External Hard Drive that Clicks

[ngc7293]

I have an older external HDD (250gig) that I got from a friend). A year ago, it died from a bad USB port on the back of the drive. I salvaged the drive, a Western Digital, and put it into a new external case.

I have noticed that every once in a while the drive will CLICK. From experience I have learned that a hard drive can get drive errors and be repaired but once it starts making noises, it is on its way out.

I am not a hundred percent sure the clicking is from the drive but can't think of where else it could be from. The new case doesn't have a fan.

The Click is a single noise that doesn't always happen when I am reading or writing to the drive. I frequently unplug the drive from the laptop.

On the odd side, I have heard the click noise while the drive was off and disconnected. I do leave it connected to the powersupply though.

Any thoughts?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Do you just hear one click at a time, or several clicks (not necessarily in a constant rhythm)?

The occasional single click is most likely the driving parking/unparking its heads. Intermittent clusters of clicks would, I agree, imply an impending drive failure.

 

[ngc7293]

Would the drive head parking and unparking happen even after the drive has sat for a half hour off?

It's not a click, click, click type noise. As above, there is time in between the Click noise.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Well, normally, a drive not in use will power down (and park) after a while, only starting up again once it's needed. It normally won't turn off and on. But that could be a flaw in the power management of the drive itself.

The clicking you hear in a failing drive are the heads realigning to read data that couldn't be retrieved on the first pass, so this will often happen repeatedly since even the second pass may not work. If you aren't hearing that, then the drive itself probably isn't failing. Sporadic clicks are probably just the drive turning off/on, and it's still within the realm of possibility that the drive's own power management is faulty. This won't necessarily hurt anything, though.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

ngc, have you run any diagnostic utilities on the drive, and if so, what did you find? Any errors?

 

[ngc7293]

ngc, have you run any diagnostic utilities on the drive, and if so, what did you find? Any errors?

When the drive first died due to the bad usb port, I check the drive and found no problems and then zeroed the drive.

I haven't checked the drive since though.

 

[JustAFriend]

Even if the drive tests good, BACK YOUR DATA UP.

Used to work for a drive manufacturer many years ago and the engineers would always say, "Its not a matter of IF the drive will fail, but WHEN the drive will fail. They all do eventually."

 

[Robert Maxwell]

This is true. Always be backing up!

 

[Sheep]

FACT: Unexpected clicks coming from your HDD are the scariest noises ever.

Take everyone else's advise and backup now!

 

[Santaman]

Some drives indeed park their heads after being left idle, this to prevent the heads from hovering too long above a single track, so a click once in a while isn't anything scary, if its becomming more clicks at any given time then its time to start backing up...

 

[Unicron]

It never hurts to set out tiny cricket traps as well, just in case.

 

[Sean Aaron]

If access time to the drive is slow when these clicks are happening then I would be concerned. I had the drive on an iBook fail (a month out of warranty, naturally) and it was bearing failure characterised by periodic sounds that basically sounded like grinding. Since it was the internal hard drive it would hang up the entire machine whatever it was doing since it was trying to write cache files or whatever.

I managed to get a couple of decent backups before it finally wouldn't boot at all.

 

[ngc7293]

This is a large IDE harddrive that was in one external case. I had no CLICK noise from it and it only occured when I moved it to the new case. I did as suggested and got another external drive and moved everything to it. It is just fortunate that I didn't have a lot of stuff on it. I still use it but I keep junk on it, so if it ever does crash, there is nothing to worry about.