re whats this thermal recalibration on quantum drives in article mar midway uchicago edu gary midway uchicago edu writes whether the drive is hooked up to the computer or not the lps makes a disk seek noise every seconds this is consistent and will continue as lomg as the drive is powered up even if i disconnect the drive from the computer this drive activity continues at second intervals someone tried to tell me the drive was doing a thermal recalibration not knowing beans about the internal physical workings of the lastest disk drive technology i guess i might believe anything whats the scoop on this standalone drive activity every sec i can only comment on thermal recalibration in general some new drives perform it in order to increase overall integrity of data writes basically the firmware instructs the actuator to perform a test to see if the data tracks are within a certain physical tolerance since when the media heats up or cools down some track drift is inevitable and the drive has to monitor it this becomes especially critical at very high recording densities and so was used primarily on very large capacity mechanisms but it seems to be finding its way into more smaller drives as a way of boosting the drive s long term reliability and mtbf ratings i first became aware of thermal recalibration when it was pointed out that the technique conflicts with prolonged write times when digitizing say audio or video to hard disk some manufacturers explicitly state that drives with thermal recalibration are not to be used for applications that have prolonged disk writes hope this helps victor
