WD hdd clicking
Hi guys;
I know there are few threads on this allready but.........
My wd 80gb 8mb buffer has started to click.
Its under a year old, but it has gone from Canada to Korea with me. The humidity here is unreal in the summer, and the dust that collects everywhere is sick. I clean out my case monthly.
It clicks randomly, when accessing the drive.
I have defragged
and run WD data life guard diagnostics, both the basic and extended test say the drive is in fine health.
Any other good tools or better tools to check the drives health?
Someone lie to me and say that the clicken is nothin to worry about.............. or maybe hmmm maybe ill just need to get an new 120gb drive
I know there are few threads on this allready but.........
My wd 80gb 8mb buffer has started to click.
Its under a year old, but it has gone from Canada to Korea with me. The humidity here is unreal in the summer, and the dust that collects everywhere is sick. I clean out my case monthly.
It clicks randomly, when accessing the drive.
I have defragged
and run WD data life guard diagnostics, both the basic and extended test say the drive is in fine health.
Any other good tools or better tools to check the drives health?
Someone lie to me and say that the clicken is nothin to worry about.............. or maybe hmmm maybe ill just need to get an new 120gb drive
0
Comments
I had one in a 4 drive array start clicking and I ran WD's disk utility on my array one drive at a time (boy talk about time consuming) and it would be just fine but one day I was pulling data off it onto my Shuttle and it started clicking loudly and it died.
I'm not gonna lie, brother.
Get rid of that thing, fast. I don't care what Data Lifeguard says. It should NOT be clicking.
If its happening during the read and write operations, its the same issue but worse...
No matter what... Its a very bad thing... back up and replace the drive while its under warranty...
Gobbles
Looks like im gonna have to go and get a 120gb drive, back this bad boy up and send it off.
Which isnt such a bad thing really.
Not a single click during the transfer.
So it is an idle clicking.
Gonna gonna get WD to replace the older drive.
I ran the software and ALL the tests passed. It didn't click once. (I had the hard drive in a different computer when I was doing this.) I then low-leveled formatted, no problem there. Then repartitioned and reformatted again and still no clicking. Now I have been using the same drive for about 3 weeks now (running 24/7) with no problems at all. Very Strange...
Let me make a suggestion-- a metal constructed HD should not be run after extreme temp changes until AFTER it reaches room temp,and that can be 24-36 hours after arrival at destination. If they are run while parts are real cold, two things will happen-- first, both the platters and media coating will shrink some, enough to drive modern HDs nuts trying to read the data, and second the data will be differently spaced on HD due to shrinkage of metal arms, media (base platter on a WD, for most, IS metal alloy that is polished smooth, then coatings are applied to receive data), and other metal parts so it is best to use HDs when at same basic temp as formatted. Remember data tracks need to be very evenly spaced, otherwise you get tracks miswritten over other data.
Normal modern computers tend to shut down drives as part of deep suspend, and good drives autopark then, and the click is the arms starting to be moved as the motor starts up or stopping against stops (this seond is BAD,some viruses were written that literally do just that, cause the HD to read beyond its data end point again and again until the read head arms are trashed and bent and the drive crashes).
When I say read head, I mean Read\Write combo head, but it cannot do both at once.
John.
I got an email from WD today.
"Western Digital sells hard drives directly and indirectly to most countries in the world. When they are sold to specific regions of the world, they are sold with explicit warranties applicable to those regions only. When these hard drives leave their designated regions, their limited warranty no longer applies. For proper warranty service, please visit your hard drive's original place of purchase. Your drive is only in warranty in North America."
So I am S.O.L with this drive.
I have a diferent 80gb wd drive that is three months old, I bought it here in south korea. Im gonna be S.O.L with its warrenty when I go home in july. Thats retarded and im pissed off. I soppose I could send the clicking drive home, but the cost of shipping from here to canada and back again is allmost the cost of a new drive.
If I do buy another drive here, a 120gb, im gonna look into seagates warrenty before I buy one, if any.
My 60GB IBM Deskstar, which is about 2 years old now, is the remaining functional drive.
I didn't read all the posts so pardon me if I repeat others answers... Often your hitting bad places on the disk surface. You can often correct the problem by low-level formating the drive and thus locking out the bad sectors.
Tex
Since I am out of luck with my warrenty, this weekend it is format time
Thank god I have a second drive to back everything up on to, which I did at the first sounds of clicking.
hearing that clicks are bad concerns me a bit. this is during an idle time, and I was thinking it may be because of it being in the removable drawer?
Not necessarily. the HD drivers and IDe drivers and possibly the SATA drivers can time out a drive and the WD drives tend to park and latch to parked after while of not being used also. that lathcing lets them take 40G hits if not running. The click, if fairly quite and not often while computer is running, might be a drive thta does not constantly get ahigh volume of data and times-out and parks and latches the heads and arms in park. That will produce a fine clicking. IF the drive starts to whistle or hum and click real often, or screeches, then you need to think about getting a new drive soon (very soon).
My WDs click quietly at random while the computer is on-- typically the archive drive clicks when I burn CDs of archived ISOs ONCE as it unparks, then clicks once after after burning when it times out after a while of not being accessed as it parks. The boot drive is almost always on, almost never clicks and the drivers for the IDE for XP for my motherboard seem to park it less often than the more occassional use archive drive. But, none of them produce other noises like a whistle or screech or loud hum also. I have a 13+ year old WD Caviar mech that also does this clicking only, and it has no data errors and I in fact use it to test IDE cables on my test rig. The Protege drives, which are slower RPM anyhow, are noisier also and do not last as long as the Caviar series drives. The old drive has a lot more metal in it than the newer drives, but all have metal alloy parking latch assembly. It takes something extreme to break the parking latch, but it clicks as it is activated to unlatch and latch-- the newer Caviars click more quietly, by a tiny bit, than the old one, but the older one hums some to itself more than the newer Caviars which have more nylon parts in them for gears.
Given your humidity issue, I would listen for and be watchful for signs of ohter things happening other than parking latch clicks. Real rapid constant clicking can be a nylon gear with a broken tooth, but normally you get toher sysmptoms also beofre that happens or at same time.
Why do drives park so often??? To save energy they spin down when not used for a while, and in the case of the WD drives they autopark when they spin down. The park latch is spring loaded and has to be pushed open to allow the drive arms to move. Once the drive arms have moved a certain distance in millimeters, the latch no longer engages and thus should be few to no clicks until it parks for energy conservation reasons after period of not being accessed. Clicking a lot while drive is actively reading and writing is a bad sign, but once in a while when computer is on is normal for WD drives (AFAIK, ALL WD drives autopark from year one of WD's first year of life to now).
When my first 120gig died it too had begun the click of death (also WD) and it was also part of a raid-0 array, now it clicked and tapped and generally made a racket but the other drive was pretty quiet but it also went south later although it was giving SMART errors but it never went clickin' crazy.
My general rule of thumb from past experiences is that if I hear a WD drive begin clicking loudly it's time to save the good stuff (pr0n) and get ready for a death in the system.
Best Regards,
Bob
John,
i think something similar to what you describe happend to my 500 gb WD hdd ( the hdd was cold and when it was powered up it did not start anymore...) now it does the clicking and does not start at all... can i do something to recover the data from it?
Best Regards,
Bob
If its so bad that neither your bios or windows can read it then... you can send it to a data recovery center.... For a LARGE fee they can recover it off raw platters even from a non working drive........ This is usually geared to buisness's not home so dont be skeered when they quote you a fee thats several times the cost of that drive to just LOOK AT, not recover, that drive. Recovery depending on the problem could run 5 figures....
This is why we preach backups people.
Cheers
Cowboy
Also: The days of 5-figure data recovery are mostly over, Tex. It's significantly cheaper now. Most places will recover data from a single consumer HD for under $1000.
//EDIT: I found it:
http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72984
Prime it depends greatly on whats happened to the drive obviously. And I think all the links you provided agree as not a single one even gave a ball park range for an estimate on data recovery. (unless I missed one and thats possible!) I have not needed to use anyone in the last 15 months or so... Things may of changed. they used to charge $1000 for what Thrax tells folks here for free... A functioning or semi functioning drive thats read with software. I used to help folks here by swapping circuit boards etc... to recover data. I do not have a "clean room" (wink) so I do not open cases on drives...
If there is damage to the platters etc... usually its very expensive.
Cheers
Tex
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They were talking a clean room and taking out the platters etc...
Thanks
Tex
Again I have charged that for software recoverys..... When its HARDWARE (other then a circuit board...) It can run 5 figures really fast.
The ones here saying they guarantee 100 percent recovery or no charge....
I bet most of those are software based. On hardware you just can't guarantee 100 percent. With a circuit board usually even but, with drives and hardware then platters can be damaged.
I have a good buddy in Colorado thats actually ceritfied as some kind of hard drive forensic tech or something and has hardware to hook up and extract data froma totaly dead drive if the thing will spin up...... but.... just making it spin up is SOMETIMES the problem. I have a good shot if I can make it spin up even one time proper and they often go out gradually.. (long sigh...) Unfortuinatley we often dont see them until they are REALLY messed up. LOL
When they wont spin and it not the circuit board its gets messy.... (read costly) FAST
Cowboy
In the report about what could be recovered (file listing in a txt file) was the estimate for recovery at $1750 over and above the $100. The owner opted to not have it recovered. They returned the drive to me with the cover off. They were using some type of hardware to read the drive.