I decided I would bear the awful alarm sound just long enough to turn on the PC, get to the BIOS, and read off some of the sensors to see if I could discern from them what might be the issue. I would look for red flags like: high core temperature; SMART warnings; low fan RPM (or high, even; anything unusual). I powered it on -- a risk, because I had no idea what the problem was, and it might've been worsened by trying to operate the system -- and waited.
The Option ROM for my Adaptec 6405E spun up as expected, taking several seconds, and I thought it was odd that the high pitched noise hadn't started while the RAID controller was "Booting the Controller Kernel" (which takes 10-15 seconds). But then it started -- right as the RAID controller displayed on the screen, a warning that my RAID array was degraded. Aha!
So I had found the problem quite clearly: my Adaptec 6405E RAID controller was emitting a loud alarm to let me know that my RAID array was degraded, likely due to one of my four hard drives starting to die.
The permanent fix here is simple: I have to identify which HDD is failing, and replace it before my RAID-10 array dies completely. The safest way would be to stop using the computer until the replacement HDD arrives.
But I wanted to keep using the system, confident that the pair of brand new hard drives in the array could hold up for a day or two while I got the replacement disk (the disk that failed is several years old). So I had to figure out a way to shut up the alarm!
The driver you download from Adaptec's website has a command-line tool called arcconf
, which I've come to love, due to its immense power. To shut off the alarm, I ran this command in an Administrator command prompt on Windows: arcconf setalarm 1 silence
.
silence
tells arcconf
to stop notifying me about the current problem; but if another problem is detected, it'll alarm again. I don't want to set the alarm to off
, because then I won't hear it in case my RAID card is trying to tell me that another disk is failing, or perhaps the card itself.
I'm going to make light use of my system while waiting for the replacement disk, confident that my new pair of disks will be alright for basic web browsing until I get my redundant RAID-10 configuration back. I hope this answer helped you learn how to troubleshoot the possible source of an alarm coming from your computer.