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

[g33k]

I ran the long test off the dos boot disk overnight. I initially had difficulty getting it to finish the test. It would start running, then at some point it would start making the loud clicking noise and then fail and tell me to check my connections b/c it couldn't communicate with the drive. I thought it was weird because when the clicking happened when i was in the OS, playing music for instance, it would just stutter. I wasn't losing access to the drive or anything. Regardless, I unplugged the cables and used the cables leading to my BD-Rom instead. I didn't unplug any cables from the motherboard so in changing SATA cables i'm using a different port as well. The same problem occured. This always happened before it reached 1%.

This leaves the power connector, which WAS attached securely, but who knows, maybe it's something with the cable. I have an expensive modular power supply and the drives in my lower HD cage are fed by a different power cable, so I disconnected my WD Raptor and put the seagate in its place. This time, I had no problems, and I never heard the clicking noise once the test started. I listened for about 30min before I started a movie. In the past I would always hear it within the first 1%, however i did hear it when I rebooted and HD detection after POST took a while (and the drive clicked while it was detecting).

The test took about 7 hours to run and didn't report any errors. When I booted back in to Windows and ran SeaTools again, I performed all of the short tests. The first time I ran the short generic it took about 4 minutes, which is still longer than my 1TB drive but it was a heck of a lot better. When I re-run the tests now, it takes just over a minute and there's no clicking noise. In the past, it would consistently take around 8 minutes to perform the short generic and there would be tons of clicking. It's been a while and my memory is a little hazy, but I'm pretty sure I tested them at the office too and that I heard clicking there as well..

I don't know what to think at think at this point. I am currently copying over 1TB of media to the drive and I haven't heard any abnormal clicking. Before I RMA I'm going to live with it and keep it constantly working over the weekend to see if it deteriorates. The stuff on it is just copies of stuff on another drive so if it fails in that time or the problem returns it's not a big deal.

I'm also going to plug my raptor or maybe my 1TB seagate into the same power/sata connectors that my other drive was connected to and run the long test on that and see if it aborts for the same reason of being unable to communicate with the drive. Theoretically, it should.  

[Cantbecanit]

Long shot guy's, but what make and rating PSU's are you using, if you have a loaded PC and a small or generic PSU it might not be supplying 100% juice 100% of the time, one test you could try is a strip out, just one one memory module and disconnect any DVD drives that aren't required right now, all cards out except the graphic one, this still might not show it though, but if you have asy a 350w PSU with no name on it, you can rest assured it won't be supplying what it says it can, best ones I can recommend are OCZ,Antec,Thermaltake,Corsair and Gigabyte, any of those should do what it says on the tin, and if the system is less than 3 years old you should be running a 500w minimum, especially if you have a PCiE card that requires a direct hook to the PSU, hth.

p.s, if you haven't already check for a MB flash, if the board is older than the 2TB drive availability it's possible the manufacturer has written a new bios to better support this size drive.

Message Edited by Cantbecanit on 01-15-2010 12:52 AM

[g33k]

I'll flash my bios but i really don't think that's it. It's a recent system and it's an asus motherboard.

For power I have an Antec CP-850. It's a beast. I have several hard drives but this thing is equipped for dual power-hungry video cards and i just have a lowly old 8800gts in it. I'm not putting it anywhere close to its limits.

http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=NzIw

Anyway, after my recent success with Drive #1, I now have drive #2 plugged in to where drive #1 was when it was making the loud clicking noises. I ran the short dst & generic tests and no noise. I also started the long test to see if I'd get the same message as i did for drive #1 about checking cables b/c it can't communicate with the drive and it didn't happen.Both drives are quiet now and I'm copying about 1TB of data from drive 1 to drive 2. I'm hoping it was just some sort of loose connection. I'm going to reverse them and test again though. And then I'm going to set them up in RAID-1 and find some sort of stress test to run on them for a couple hundred hours until I feel confident that they're ok.

I'm gonna open a case with seagate just to be safe though. 

[nowclicking]

Some people never learn including me. After nightmares with 2 1tb 7200.11s and 1 1tb ES.2 I went ahead and bought 3 2tb LP drives.

My reasoning was "Low Power" = "More Reliable" as these are not performance oriented disks.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

All 3! of them click within the first day of ownership.

2 of them clicked straight away on power up and the 3rd one started clicking randomly within the first day.

All 3 are in 3 different pcs using expensive branded psus from 500 to 750w.

When disks are connected on a shared sata power supply connector I can hear the psu being taxed by these "LP" drives.

All disks are now connected to a dedicated sata power connector but still click.

When the disks are clicking they are unresponsive.

This is clearly a design fault (100% failure in my 3 disks). As the saying goes fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...

Thank you Seagate for a great product once again and your continues policy of DENIAL.

You can see the clicking below (dips in graph). I have also graphs showing access time over 150ms! This was when the disk was heavily clicking.

[Hugster]

best thing to do is RMA the HDD right after it starts the clicking because it only gets worse

your whole system performance will degrade as the whole PC stutters when HDD clicks especially if it is the primary drive

[nowclicking]

All primary drives are NOT Seagate. I am not that stupid. The 3 drives were bought as extra storage/backup thinking they would be reliable as they are slow*.
System performance doesn't degrade at all since they are not primary. Just the annoying clicking reminding you, you've just bought 3 bricks and now you have to send them back.

I hope the retailer gives me credit for them cause there is no way in heck I'm getting another 3 of them back.

My 3 clicking drives are all:

Product of China

dated 20 June 2009 (09511) according to http://www.bugaco.com/calculators/seagate_date_code.php

CC32 firmware

*These drives are not as slow as their 5900rpm speed suggests.

[JasonRye]

know this is an old thread, but this info may help those who follow.

Regarding disk drive analysis, with HD Tune in particular....  I was just checking out a used 250GB drive using HDTune 2.55.  I got this HUGE downward spike very near the end of the high sector numbers.  I also had the downward spikes regularly spaced.  On a hunch, I disabled my LAN connection.  QUESS WHAT!?  Those downward spikes WENT AWAY!  Why?  Polling.

You MUST eliminate competition for CPU (and channel) to get accurate results.  Case in point: I then paused protection on my antivirus/etc software, MUCH more consistant results and the access time curve actually LOOKED like a curve now!

When you analyse a drive you have GOT to eliminate confounding factors, which are going to be interrupts (internal and external) and whatever other resident tasks you've got running on the box.

FWIW no clicking in the least during any of these tests.  My point: I don't think one is related to the other.

[steve657]

Except LAN activity and anti-virus are normal aspects of computer use.

If they are causing a drive to click like crazy, then the problem is with the drive, not with the LAN connection.

A loud click is not acceptable from a HDD because noise of course is kinetic energy being converted suddenly into sound energy, and the louder it is, the more energy involved. In a HDD it means something is coming to a very sudden stop against something else....which of course is very bad for the tiny components inside a hard-disk.

[Cantbecanit]

I think Jason is highlighting to turn them off for test purposes Steve, so you get a clean test.

[steve657]

Oh yes that's correct. I saw the thread title and thought he was referring to clicks in general.