HDD clicking sound

I bought a WD 320gb about a week ago which started to do the sound two days after I installed it.

Already run a few programs like hdtune and the factory diagnostic software to check if the hdd was faulty, even did a surface scan to check fo bad sectors etc and everything was clean, no issues.

At the end I changed the APM setting to 254 and the clicking noise stoppped.

My question is.. Is all of this normal for a new hdd ?

 

lets see....... high precision mechanical device making funny noises out of the box.

Should I or should I not return it under warranty?

Hmmmmmmmm

 

Factory diagnostics saying the hdd is ok...

Except if we assume that the programmers designed the software(s) are clueless

 

well i have the same drive , no noise , it was silent even when i cloned the old drive to it on my thermaltake drive dock . So from inside a laptop it should be silent . How loud is it ? , Whatever i would return it and get a new one , sometimes in shipping they are knocked around enough to damage them , why take a chance .

 

Yea its not something all the drives have, probably a malfunction somewhere on the drive (not sure if it can be fixed with newer firmware, although i cant find any). For some reason everything seems to be ok according to diagnostics.

If im not mistaken the sound happens then the drive tries to pack in the head.

The noise is pretty "loud" you can hear it clearly, happens every 4~secs when the drive is NOT working. If its working it stops doing the sound. Hence why forcing the drive to never go idle eliminates the issue.

The only problem i have with sending the hdd back is that i have to backup 200gb of data and have no where to put them lol

 

or, if the drive dies, then you have no drive and no data.

 

+1.

However the kind of clicking the OP is experiencing is normal, and the drive is indeed parking its heads. My old Toshiba laptop used to do this all the time, and the HDD worked fine for the two years i had it.

I would still check the drive's firmware version and google around a bit, if i remember right WD had a bad firmware on some of their drives.

 

think that was seagate , had to upgrade firmware on 6 of my seagate drives

 

If its "normal" then its not that bad Since if you disable the idle mode the hdd doesnt try to pack the head in so it makes no sound. The bad side of that is that you lose a few minutes of battery but nothing big.

Not like i ever use this laptop on battery....

 

Hi CooLMinE,

This problem isn't uncommon.

I had the same problem with a WD320BEKT which I thought I had solved by running NHC from http://www.pbus-167.com/. (See: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=304132 ,where I incorrectly refer to the HDD as a WD320BJKT).

I also ran the WD diagnostic software without success and finally exchanged the WD320BEKT (without free-fall sensor) for a WD320BJKT (with free-fall sensor) and the clicking stopped.

Others, however, have also had the clicking problem with the WD320BJKT, so it seems to vary between individual drives in the same series and I may just have got lucky with the BJKT (or unlucky with the BEKT).

See: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=348710&page=6

You shouldn't have to put up with the clicking or use 3rd party software to try to control it, and I would suggest you exchange it for another WD unit which hopefully doesn't click.

 

Im using the same hdd, the one without free fall sensor. I dont really need a 3rd party software since i use hdparm (which basically does the same thing as the NHC solution), so i dont need to have anything running all the time in order for the clicking to stop so it doesnt bother me that much as long as the hdd isnt going to die on me

 

Still better to be safe than to be sorry.. if its dies your really gonna regret it... just return it and ask for another one..