I have two identical hard drives of this tipe ST31500341AS, about 2.5 years old.
They both have firmware SD1B and worked fine until now. One of them started clicking, at first only once every few minutes, but eventually got worse and got to a continuous clicking about once every two seconds.
The second drive did the same thing two weeks later, threatening to lose all my data, including what i managed to salvage from the other drive.
I found a solution to this problem completely by accident, when I was handling with my bare hands one of the hard drives, WHILE IT WAS POWERD ON.
I discovered that touching the bare circuit board with my fingers caused the write heads inside the hard drive to go all crazy, emitting loud clicking sounds and high pitched sounds. After playing around with my fingers on the circuit board for a few seconds, I found that when a leaved it alone the drive immediately stopped clicking and began working normally again. After a full format I found no bad sectors and the overall performance is great. Since then I copied almost 1.4 TB of data back to the drive and everything works fine, not a single click since.
I have done the exact same thing with my second drive and it worked like a miracle, although I must admit that I had to repeat the circuit board massaging routine 4 or 5 times until the clicking stopped completely and performance returned to what it was before. For a while I was still getting occasional clicking and decreased transfer rates, but eventually it all gone away.
Perhaps one of the forum moderators can report this to the tech support. Maybe this is some weird firmware bug, and not an actual hardware failure.
I just cant explain how two identical hard disks can possibly come back from the dead like that.
