Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[bradsm87]

The first one started clicking harshly and movies/music started stuffing up playback and copies were 20x slower. I swapped it that day for another one and just wiped the RAID 5 array and started again considering I still had all my data from my old 5x 1TB drives and had nothing new.

About 2 days later, 1 of the drives got the clack clack clack again. Called up where I bought them and they said they'll have more in stock in a few days. I stopped using the RAID array but kept it plugged in. Now yesterday 2 more drives started clicking in the same way and 1 showed up as missing then back online in the RAID software. Now the RAID controller is trying to rebuild the array with 3 click of death drives!!! I turned off the PC.

I thought surely 4 out of 5 new drives aren't faulty so I borrowed a BRAND NEW Corsair power supply and hooked up ONLY THE DRIVES and shorted the 2 pins on the ATX connector to power up the PSU without the computer itself.

THEY STILL CLICK WITH THE NEW PSU POWERING ONLY THE DRIVES> What the heck??? I am SO scared about my 4.5TB of data as I can not afford to buy enough drives to back up 4.5TB of data. I figured RAID 5 has redundancy and the chance of 2 drives out of 4 failing is meant to be like 10 to the power of a zillion.

Please help seagate.

[bradsm87]

Because this is WELL, WELL outside the posted failure rate, I would like to also see something well outside "normal" warranty procedures. I believe all of the data is recoverable (just very slowly).

I can't get anywhere with Seagate on the phone. All they know is to follow exactly what they've been told to do (get serial no, approve RMA, ask customer to send drive)

THESE ARE ALL NEW DRIVES. I EXPECT THAT SOMEONE CAN SEND ME 4 WORKING DRIVES TO COPY MY DATA ON TO. I will obviosly send the faulty ones back.

PLEASE help me. It's getting longer and longer since I bought them. The fault happened within a few days of buying them new.

[saec]

Try the last CC35 firmware :

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=213915&Hilite=

Check/replace SATA cables

[bradsm87]

Thanks for the link.

I upgraded all of the drives to CC35 and it seems a bit better. They still click just as bad during startup but once in Windows for a good 5 minutes, the noise seems to stop, even while the RAID is rebuilding. The noise still shouldn't happen at all. It is just a data volume so it shouldn't even be reading from it during startup.

I'll just let the RAID rebuild and use it for a few days and see what happens. These noises are NOT acceptable but once I know my data is a bit safer, I'll be happier to give it more time for a future firmware fix before returning the drives.

[Grim0x]

Well, I'm not too sure about that future firmware fix to be honest!

I honestly recommend you look into getting some maxtor drives. The drives you have can be... problematic (as you've experienced.)

[bradsm87]

The RAID id now rebuilt and the clicks have gone completely. It's like the new firmware had to "self-learn" something to do with parking the heads which would explain why it clicked for the first 5 minutes but never since.

[Grim0x]

Well then! Glad to hear!

I cant think of what would cause it to stop clicking after a while - other than to say, thats how these things work

You firmware cant "learn" as far as I know.

Its ROM (read only memory )

But perhaps it has certain algorithms set up, which function based on SMART values?