WD Scorpio Black 320GB Clicking noises solved

This evening I installed a WD3200BJKT in my Sony SZ79, and while I was pleased withe the performance (see below for HD Tune result), I was NOT happy with the almost constant clicking the drive made.

I thought this problem occurred with the 7200.3 Seagates and not the WD, which is one of the reasons I went for the WD instead of the Seagate.

I was imagining the drive would have to go back when I read another post elsewhere on this site that mentioned NHC being used to solving clicking problems.

To my relief, the clicking issue was cured by downloading and running NHC from http://www.pbus-167.com/ . Definitely worth a try if you are having the same issues with a WD drive.

 

Just by running NHC ?

 

I just bought mine too, and i ha clickning noice the first day, but it went away automatically haven't clicked since.


I'll post two benchies of my WD3200BEKT too. Seems like equal performance, i've tested with 8MB blocks. The burst-speed isn't really the same as yours though.

 

Burst Rates are different due to the difference in controllers or HDD mode. It doesn't really affect performance.

Wish K-Tron posted the HD Tune result of his 7K320 160GB.

 

Yes Andy, that seemed to be the case. I changed the accoustic and performance settings under the Hard Disk tab in NHC and the clicking stopped immediately.

 

Yes i know, thanks

Noticed shall be that i've had some services running in the background while running HD tune

Here's also a result with 1MB blocks.

 

Ohh, so you increased both the Advanced Power Management and Acoustic Manangement (AAM) to 254, and it stopped the clicking. Right ?

 

Yep, increased both to 254. Didn't know what I was doing, but "Max. Performance" sounded good for Advanced Power Management, and I put a matching setting for Acoustic Management. Despite my ignorance, it did the trick!

 

Too bad NHC is still not compatible with 64bit vista...

 

Hi Michel.K, my HD Tune was tested with 64k blocks. I have since run it with 1 and 8MB blocks with fairly similar results.

The burst rate on this Sony has always been comparatively high. The 5,400rpm 320GB Hitachi that the WD replaced used to have a burst rate of around 110MB, but an average of around 47MB.

 

Actually, anybody who has clicking sounds with their Scorpio Black should check this out, right from WD:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...WFyY2hfdGV4dD1jbGlja2luZw**&p_li=&p_topview=1

 

I actually had a look at this but gave up the idea of using it for 2 reasons:

1. It was released on 01/18/2007, and as my HDD was manufactured in August 08, I assumed (probably wrongly) that it SHOULD already have incorporated the optimization update contained in the programme WD had released 19 months earlier;and

2. It required me to extract the files onto an empty, "formatted floppy diskette" and to boot from that diskette. This requirement seemed pretty out of date, given that my last notebook with a floppy drive was bought back in 2000.

As it is, NHC seems to have fixed the problem, which is great http://forum.notebookreview.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

Yes faruk, but still they are asking you to boot from a floppy drive, and I am not aware of any laptop that still uses floppy drives.

(*) and no, I wouldn't buy a USB floppy drive just to calibrate a HDD that should be well calibrated by its manufacturer.

 

I did post my performance of the 7K320 160gb version, and it completely owns everyone elses 7200rpm drives, you can see it here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=138761&page=27

K-TRON

 

Well of course laptops don't have floppy drives anymore, but it's pretty easy to make a bootable USB thumb drive or burn the image onto a CD with floppy emulation - but yeah it might be more effort than what it's worth if there's another easy way to fix it

 

If we accept that laptops in general don't have floppy drives anymore, it makes you wonder why on earth WD would post a solution in Jan 07 that specifically asked you to create and boot from a floppy drive - its seriously out of touch with reality.

As the problem had been identified and a solution posted by WD back in Jan 07, it makes you wonder why the problem still exists in drives made in August 08.

Apart from this dummy spit, I must say I am very pleased with the WD320BEKT!

 

How the hell???? I think HD tune was on drug

 

Han, I know it makes absolutely no sense. Phil and I think that the errors are because of the onboard raid memory. We think that it is causing the very strange results.
The same happened with my 7K200 array. They scored like 250mb/sec in Raid 0, which is just unheard of.
I am going to run pcmark 05 soon, so I can see the actual results of the drive. Hopefully those arent convulted as well.

If pcmark tells me their like 100mb/sec in startup, I am going to say the 7k320 160gb is the winner.

K-TRON

 

okay I ran pcmark professional 2005 on my system, and my 7K320 is performing very strange again.
It is reading the scores much too low, like half of the speed it should be reading.
my startup speed is 4.5mb/sec, virus scan is 33mb/sec and so forth. Everything is performing almost exactly half of what it should. While hdtune, sandra, and hdtach all say its performing more than 2x faster than it should.
I think these programs just do not work with hardware based raid systems.
The other day I got 19.7mb/sec on startup, and now I have 4.55mb/sec.

actual scores:
hdd startup 4.505mb/sec
hdd application loading 4.138mb/sec
hdd general usage 3.280mb/sec
hdd virus scan 33.065mb/sec
hdd file write 8.701mb/sec

Something is very screwy, I am using pcmark 05 release 110.

K-TRON

 

Yep bought two "WD3200BEKT" drives for my Gateway P-7811FX and the 2nd drive is making the clicking noises as well. I tried the link above to WD's website for the exe fix. So I make a bootable USB drive to try it out and no luck it told me it couldn't find the drives so that's a no go =( Since I'm running raid 1 (have to for work) this is driving me nuts hearing the clicking noise and on top of that when it clicks while I'm watching an AVI or QT it will lag the video for a sec or two. I'm running Vista 64 so I can't install NHC.

Has anyone come up with a fix that doesn't involve installing programs to make this stop or should I give up, RMA the drives and go with Seagate?

 

I also would like to know if there's someone out there that can answer this since I'm trying to pick...

 

Don't bother, I just said fook it and bought two seagate drives. Not going to deal with all the work arounds, hacks, or 3ed party apps I need to install to make the **** drives do what they should do in the first place. Never again will I buy WD until everything is SSD!

 

Unfortunately Seagate drives can click too. We've had whole threads about them.

 

Interestingly, the first Seagate 5400.5 320GB I got had a clicking problem. I exchanged it for an exact same model due to other issues and there was no clicking anymore.

 

So, is this clicking a matter of luck after all?

I was also thinking of buying a 320GB 7200 drive, but I wouldn't like to sacrifice the noiseless operation of my Fujitsu @5400 drive.

I prefer it to be slow and noiseless than fast and noisy.

 

It seem to be partly luck, partly settings/BIOS.

 

And Samsung - both of mine do it.

 

I think Hitachi is least likely to click, but I'm not sure.

 

My 2 WD Scorpios, 320 Black 7200 don`t click, or I`m deaf...hmm.

 

I tried running that WD program- it didn't work.

Made a bootable disk with Nero.... did absolutely nothing.

 

i've been having problems with my WD scorpio 2.5" 320GB 7200rpm HD (on vista home premium). here is WD's official response with info on creating a bootable XP cd from a non-XP machine - unfortunately, i can't post links yet. PM me if you need them.

disclaimer: i haven't tried this yet so i hope it works:

***************************************

microsoft support:
How to create a bootable floppy disk for an NTFS or FAT partition in Windows XP

How to obtain Windows XP Setup disks for a floppy boot installation

WD Response
try, if possible making the floppy or cd from an XP PC so we can boot the Vista laptop with the disk.

During normal operation, a WD Scorpio 2.5" hard drive will make a clicking noise when attempting to enter into power-saver or standby mode.

This issue is caused by a system initiated power management command being interpreted incorrectly by the hard drive.

There is a WD Scorpio 2.5" hard drive optimization utility available to resolve this issue.

Please follow the directions below to download and run the utility.

IMPORTANT: Please ensure that AC power is connected to, and supplying power to the laptop computer before attempting to run the WD Scorpio 2.5" hard drive optimization utility.

Although this utility should not alter any data on the hard drive, Western Digital recommends backing up any data on the hard drive before running this utility.

Download the file wdupd020.zip to any Windows based computer system and use an extraction utility (such as WinZip) to extract all files onto a bootable DOS floppy diskette or DOS bootable CD.

Insert the floppy diskette or CD into the computer system with the WD Scorpio 2.5" hard drive.

If the computer system is running, save any open documents, close any open programs, and reboot the computer. If the computer system is off, please start the computer.

Please Note: If the computer system does not boot to the floppy diskette or CD, you may need to enter the computer BIOS and set the floppy drive as the first boot device (before the hard drive or CD-ROM drive).

After booting to the DOS bootable diskette or DOS bootable CD, type wdupd020.exe and press enter. Highlight the Western Digital hard drive using the arrow keys.

The listing will show "Update Applicable" under status. Press Enter to continue.

Press Y to accept the license agreement. Follow the instructions listed and press Enter to continue.

The application will report "Update Completed." Follow the remaining instructions and press Enter to exit the utility.

Remove the floppy diskette and restart your system.

 

Hi,

I have the same issue. I got a WD3200BEKT for my Macbook Pro.
I run this tool from WD, which was a little bit tricky because even I have a USB diskette drive the macbook absolutely can't boot from it and in MS DOS mode (from MS DOS Boot CD) my keyboard doesn't work properly. I had to get a FreeDOS live CD and boot from that.

Well, after all the WD tool found my drive and stated: "No harddrives need to be updated". So, you don't need to waste more time in this tool, it's outdated.

Now I'm wondering if I should just send this drive back and get a new one. May be it will not clicking.

What I simply don't understand is, that drives with such issues are released to the marked. It's not just a problem of noise, but of speed also. For example, when I open the windows start menu and windows has to look on the hd for some reason, it tooks nealry 1 second until the head parking and unparking is completed and the information from the hd can be obtained. So it tooks nearly a whole second to open the startmenu (sometimes) or complete the click on a button or...

How can this happen, not only to WD but also to other companies (from what i've read)???

dartrax