Clicking HD. Normal or HD Failure?

Just got a new M1530:

When idle, my harddrive makes a very faint clicking noise. By "clicking", I mean the same sound it makes when it is loading something... you know, that "tik tik tik" noise. However, when idle, it tends to make little "tik" noises every 2/3 seconds or so.

Now, according to the internet, clicking means my HD is about to die... but having looked on youtube, by clicking people mean very loud clicking, like i was turning a light switch on and off...

Now I don't know. Is "access" clicking every few seconds normal? Or should i get my hd replaced??

To clarify, the clicking i am experiencing is no louder than the clicking you hear when ur HD is accessing information. If I used HDParm and play with the settings, the clicking sounds becomes almost impossible to hear and less frequent.

 

What model HDD do you have?
Some drives tick occasionally because of a power management setting they have.

If you have a Seagate drive there is an update available from Dell which should fix it. If not, read this thread.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425

 

Western Digital

I don't mind the sound, as long as it is not a sign of a failing HD

 

Sounds like what I described (my WD drive does the same).
The clicking a failing drive makes is a lot more dramatic also.

 

Notebook drives regularly make that sound when parking the heads. Some are louder than others. When a laptop drive starts making the "Click-o-Death", it is usually too late to do anything about it.. IME

 

But parking heads is not mean the HD is failing does it?

How do you tell the difference between parking heads and failure?

Is parking heads every few seconds gonna kill the HD very quickly?

Am I just being paranoid?

 

if i used HDparm and use the setting -B 254 hda, the clicking sound all but vanishes... but the HD seems to make more "fan-like" noise.

 

Failure noises are often grinding noises that arise from mechanical components rubbing together. For example, the bearings on the spindle motor (that spins up the platters) wear out.

The reason why the clicking sound vanishes under HDparm is because you set the HD to not park the drive, and instead keep the platters spinning; hence the fan-like noise.

 

Why did i know it was a WD?

I'm not too worried about the occasional tick. I've used WD drives in my desktops and am familiar with those torettes like symptoms.

What concerns me is the repetitive, cycle like tick you described. By the time the sound reaches our ears, it's fairly innocuous. Use a stethoscope and you'll hear something more true to it's character.

Hdparm works, but it works because it makes changes to the drives original design parameters. Otherwise, all WD's would need it.

I would say to just keep a close ear to the drive. If it starts to become significantly louder, immediately start migrating your files.

 

All hard drives fail. Make backups. That is the philosophy to live by. If you are too lazy to keep backups, consider an online service like Mozy for the important stuff..

I use Delta Copy to make daily backups to a single RAID-5 server from all my machines. I then use Mozy to keep off-site backups of the data on the server.