Drive "whack" on startup - not good

[Carson Dyle]

Strange problem... I just bought two used Samsung F3EG 2TB drives. They'll be installed in my Win2k3 file server, so I first needed to format them on my Windows 7 Pro system to make sure that they were properly aligned.

The motherboard in the Win7 system is an ASUS P8Z77-M PRO. I currently have a Samsung 830 SSD on one of the two SATA 6Gb ports, and a 1 TB drive on one of the four SATA 3Gb ports.

I attached the first Samsung to the free SATA 6Gb port. One startup, the drive made loud "whack" noise, plus a couple more less loud knocking noises. Running CrystalDiskInfo, it showed the SMART status of the drive as "Bad", with a failure of the Spin-Up Time. The drive seemed to be working OK, though, and I went ahead and formatted it. I replaced the first drive with the second and it did _exactly_ the same thing. Wondering if it had anything to do with the SATA port, I shut down and moved the drive to an open SATA 3Gb port. No noise this time on startup, and checking the SMART info, it showed no failure and a normal spin-up time.

Any idea why this happened?

 

[NickelPlate]

I doubt it had anything to do with the SATA port. When disk drives start making noises like that it's usually not a good sign of thing to come. Check to see how old the drives are, there should be a date of mfg printed on the label somewhere. I'd run a full scan disk on it or use a HD utility to scan for surface errors. If it comes up clean, then go ahead and use it but I would be wary of using it for mission critical applications.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Thanks for the reply, but I really don't think there's anything wrong with the drives, unless they were damaged to some degree by whatever happened. I've powered them up and down a dozen or more times since then and they're both silent. I've also now moved them into the server and copied a few terabytes of data onto and off of them for testing, without a hitch or so much as a click.