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Complicated hard drive question.........

B

bullion416

Senior member
I just got a Maxtor 6Y060L0 hard drive (60 gig, ata/133, 7200 rpm). Well, I am on my second drive now. The first one starting making this periodic clicking noise (didn't seem to affect performance). Well, Maxtor switched it out for me. I just installed the new drive and a day later I am getting radom clicks every once in a long while. It is always just one click and then it stops (it is NOT a repeated clicking noise). I would find it hard to believe that I have another faulty hard drive. What do you think about this situation? Is this a normal sound to hear every once i a long while (maybe 3 times a time at most). Could this be a result of a faulty BIOS setting or a problem with my Windows XP Pro OS? I need some advice. Thanks
 
If you are concerned about the drive, download from Maxtor their diagnostics and make a diagnostics disk. Then run it against the drive. It will usually flag a problem drive. And as the previous post said, might be the SMART routines. I have read at Adrian Rojak windows website, www.rojakpot.com, that with SMART enabled in the BIOS, there might be some odd things going on with the system. And read it didn't really do much unless you had some other software running as well. I have since started turning it off on the systems I build and sell.
 
So, by turning off SMART monitoring (if it is on) in the bios might solve the problem? Does this affect system performance at all?
 
Originally posted by: bullion416
So, by turning off SMART monitoring (if it is on) in the bios might solve the problem? Does this affect system performance at all?
Click to expand...


All SMART does is check the drive and report if failure is near. If turned off it may speed up your boot.
 
Not quite. The DRIVE does the monitoring, and it always does that. Enabling SMART in system BIOS just makes BIOS read the drive's opinion on its status ONCE, and write the result onto the POST screen. Time lost is in the milliseconds order of magnitude.
 
Originally posted by: bullion416
So, by turning off SMART monitoring (if it is on) in the bios might solve the problem? Does this affect system performance at all?
Click to expand...

I would not recommend turning off SMART. It's designed to help look for signs of drive death and warn you. It's not perfect of course - a drive can die without warning even with SMART on, but from what I do know, if SMART reports a problem, back up the drive right away. I'd also say to download Maxtor's diagnostic utilities.

What are your full system specs, including power supply - watts and brand?
 
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