hard drive ticking

[piano632]

My Seagate 200GB hard drive makes kind of like a ticking sound in cycles. Sometimes it is quiet as can be and other times in ticks like clockwork (regardless of whether it's being accessed or not). It is not really loud, just annoying enough. It has done this since day one and I have had it now for 3 months. Nothing seems wrong with it other than the fact that it ticks for like 5 min. then goes quiet for 5 min. then ticks again for 5 min., etc. Is this something to worry about? None of my other drives has ever done this. I just want to know before the warranty runs out.

[mrtristan]

One of my Maxtors did that for a while, then died. A second did the same thing, but it's still going strong. Best thing to do is to back up your files now. I was lazy and lost a nice pile of mp3s when my drive crashed.

[northcat_8]

it's getting ready to go...backup now!!!

I just lost one of my maxtors last night...half of my stripe 0 RAID array so I lost 138 GB of stuff across both drives luckily I didn't have any video projects in the works.

Mine still clicks, and the BIOS will see the drive if I move it to a slave on IDE 1 but I can't access it in explorer and it shows as "disconnected or failed" in my RAID array.

[redwudz]

Do you have S.M.A.R.T. for HD enabled? It will usually tell you if your HD is ready to die. The clicking may be a number of things, the worst being the head assembly crashing back and forth between the stops. This is not good. You could save your files (recommended anyway) and reformat the drive. In some cases the driver may be doing weird things to your drive, like parking the heads in the safe zone every few seconds. I really can't imagine where drive clicking would be normal operation.

[devinemi83]

Man this stuff is hard to do online. I have heard "clicks" but they all sound different. Sounds differ from drive to drive. I know my old 6 gig drive doesnt "click" when accessing data but my newer 40 gig does a bit of chugging and clicking. But its in good shape cause every 2 weeks or so I give it a physical through Ontrack's Fixit program and it always tests 100%. Same for the old drive. Both maxtors, both sound dramatically different. But this is like being a mechanic and having a person call saying my car is going "chug chug ping", unless you hear it, you cant really tell.

I would test it for its SMART status and if it says something is bad, BACK UP QUICK cause it can go at any moment.

[rallynavvie]

Meh, unless that's a SCSI drive I would get ready to RMA the thing. The only other thing it could be is access noise if your pagefile is on that drive. I put pagefile space on a SCSI drive and it drove me crazy. However that particular drive is pretty quiet so you shouldn't be making out the access noise unless you're listening for it.

[flaninacupboard]

my IBM drive started clicking, clunking and creaking about 6 months prior to death. i would back up and then leave something disk intensive running in a loop for a long time. if your drive still works after a month then the clicking may just be normal. you'll probably end up with a cooked drive though.

[northcat_8]

Just as a point of reference, my definition of clicking on my drive sounds like sliding a screwdriver tip across the desk and tapping the side of a drive.

Putting the tip of the screwdriver to the side of the drive and the handle tightly against my ear, the sound is very metalic and very loud, in my case I think it is the head crashing. Putting it as a slave on IDE 1, I tried to reformat it but Partition Magic told me there were errors on the drive and operations could not be completed

I'm not a HD expert, I'm learning right along with you.

[Capmaster]

The only HD I had that did the "tick-tock of death" was a WD Caviar 1.6GB a long time ago. When it warmed up it would go into a session where it would be inaccessible until the ticking stopped. These sessions got longer and longer until it finally never came out of it.

I still have the disassembled HD on my desk at work to remind myself never to buy WD again

[piano632]

I still have the disassembled HD on my desk at work to remind myself never to buy WD again

Funny, I have 3 WD's now (80GB, 120GB, and just got a 250GB yesterday) and none have given me the slightest bit of problem. Ditto for my other Seagate 160GB which is fine. Just this 200GB Seagate has this off and on ticking. Active SMART says the drive is OK so far. I am now reformatting it to see if that might possibly help. But other than that noise, it gets no errors and reads/writes at speeds comparable to similar drives. WinXP disk management says it is "healthy" if one can rely on that.

P.S.: With all these drives, can you tell I need lots of disk space?

[Capmaster]

I still have the disassembled HD on my desk at work to remind myself never to buy WD again

Funny, I have 3 WD's now (80GB, 120GB, and just got a 250GB yesterday) and none have given me the slightest bit of problem. Ditto for my other Seagate 160GB which is fine. Just this 200GB Seagate has this off and on ticking. Active SMART says the drive is OK so far. I am now reformatting it to see if that might possibly help. But other than that noise, it gets no errors and reads/writes at speeds comparable to similar drives. WinXP disk management says it is "healthy" if one can rely on that.

P.S.: With all these drives, can you tell I need lots of disk space?

I know, I know. Everyone has anecdotal evidence that their HD is the finest ever made. The HD is there on my desk as a reminder to me to never to buy WD. Not to you. Stay with what works

And, yes, that is an insane amount of storage

I would hope that WD had cleaned up their act. I suspect they'd be out of business if they hadn't. IBM used to rule, now that Hitachi bought their HD ops, I wouldn't bet much on the future of Deskstars.

I used to be a Quantum fireball fanatic after they came out with their first 7200 RPM IDE drive. Then IBM. Now it's Seagate ....the grand old lady of PC hard drives.

[dxj40c]

When it comes to computer hardware, there is a golden rule-NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. You more than likely have a DVD writer, get a program like Ghost and backup. This program has saved me many times. Just the thought of reinstalling all my programs and configuring gives me goose-bumps. With backup, slap in a new HD, restore, and you're back in business in about 15 min.

I have tried almost every HD there is and eventually they all crash.

[thayne]

Run CHKDISC on it, it will by you some time by marking the bad sectors unusable, then order a new drive.

Also, IBM/Hitachi drives totally suck! I used to love them cause they are so fast, but 3 out of the 4 drives I have bought in the last 2 years have failed and the 4th has started making the clicks of death....

[piano632]

I still can't find anything physically wrong with this HD. Every diagnostic I've run on the drive says it is perfectly fine.

Active SMART says all parameters are "OK"
WinXP Disk Management says drive is "Healthy"
CHKDISC reports no bad sectors.

Have reformatted it and everything works great except for that occassional ticking. It seems like the ticking happens more often when the drive hasn't been accessed for awhile (it is a secondary IDE drive).

Oh, well, it's still under warranty for another 9 months. Maybe I will have to contact Seagate and see what they say. Maybe the drive has "issues" since I think it is the first HD with 100GB-per-platter density.

Oddly enough, I have never had a HD fail on me. Though, the oldest one I have is a Quantum Fireball 15GB which I've had for 3.5 years.

[guns1inger]

Similar experience with IBM. I had 2 go within 6 months (purchased at the same time) and one of the replacements started making the same ominous sounds. I have religated it to scratch disk space and replaced it with a couple of 80gb Seagates.

None of the IBMs gave any indication other than an occassional ticking (pinging). S.M.A.R.T. gave them a clean bill of health, up to and including their last boot up. Both actually died mid-session (i.e. while I was working on the PC), but thankfully, neither were my system disk at the time. After the first one went (my working drive, not system), I shifted the other to working and put a seagate in as the system drive.

I will never buy IBM drives again.