Hard Disk 'clicking'

[LIVAN]

Ok I have a very ODD problem.

I play an online game called world of warcraft, started about a month ago.


My computer was functioning normall with an Athlon XP 3200+, ECS Nforce2 mobo, 1gb of Dual Chanel 3200 ram, Power supply is a 550 watt one, forget the brand but it's a top brand.

Anyways, I installed the game initially in a SATA drive I have hooked up through a Siig2 Sata card, after awhile I would notice my game freezing and I would hear a 'click' from what I assume the drive. Once it clicks, the game comes back. This usually happens in BUSY areas of the game when alot is going on taking I assume bandwidth and computing power.

I assumed the drive was dieing so I went ahead and replaced the Sata drive as well as the Sata card. But samething happened. I assumed maybe my system was rejecting the Sata card/drive for some reason.

So I went ahead and install it in a regular ATA drive, samething!

My system otherwise is functioning properly, What can be causing this click? Drive diagnostics reveal all drives are normal!

Please help/

 

[Biggerhammer]

The constant is the motherboard and OS, sounds like. Do you hve another system you can test the hardware in?

 

[jonnyGURU]

When you got the second and third drive, did you just Ghost everything over or did you install from scratch?

If you installed from scratch, I'd say the problem is the motherboard. Otherwise, I'd say install from scratch. You World of Warcraft install could be fragmented all about the drive! Copying drive to drive really does copy drives with all of the fragmentation, errors, etc.

 

[corkyg]

That type of clicking often is the sound of the actuator arm assembly and heads seeking to find some data that can't be found. Yep! Reinstall is probably in order for that software.

As a rule, never clone a drive until after you have optimized it - not just defrag - but optimize. That might have solved the problem in the first place.

 

[bocamojo]

Usually a click will be coming from your hard drive. I have had many a HD start clicking on me over time. Some go from clicking to not functioning, or sticking, and some just keep right on working . You may want to make sure you set a static swap or paging file, to keep your disk from thashing too much (don't let windows manage the size of your pagefile if you can help it). I usually recommend setting the size of the page file to 2 1/2 or 3 times the size of your RAM. You would set both the upper and lower limits to the same number, such as 1280.

 

[Oyeve]

Could also be the PSU not supplying enuf power ot the PSU could be defective or maybe the molex to the HD is loose. I had a 250gb sata drive that clicked all the time, turned out to be a bad molex somewhere in the chain. Ended up buying a new PSU. No more clicking.

 

[LIVAN]

Thanks for all teh help, I tried everything still didn't work. I went ahead and swapped out the motherboard, I will post what I find after I get everything up.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
Could also be the PSU not supplying enuf power ot the PSU could be defective or maybe the molex to the HD is loose. I had a 250gb sata drive that clicked all the time, turned out to be a bad molex somewhere in the chain. Ended up buying a new PSU. No more clicking.

Gotta be something like this, 3 drives in a row don't do that unless they are all DiamondMax8 drives from Maxtor.

 

[jonnyGURU]

Yeah, but bad molex. Not a bad power supply. A hard drive draws so little power, especially in the difference between spin up and seek, in the grand scheme of things the PC would have a lot worse problems than this if the power supply was so bad that is would cause the actuator in the HDD to bounce.

 

[Biggerhammer]

Originally posted by: corkyg
That type of clicking often is the sound of the actuator arm assembly and heads seeking to find some data that can't be found. Yep! Reinstall is probably in order for that software.

As a rule, never clone a drive until after you have optimized it - not just defrag - but optimize. That might have solved the problem in the first place.

What software do you use to optimize a drive?

 

[LIVAN]

Fellas, it was my ECS motherboard after all. Weird the thing overclocked well and was rock solid for 6 months, completely craps out after that. Unreal.

 

[SVT Cobra]

Shoot to bad i did not get to this earlier...this is a sypmtom of an overclocked stressed mobo...back it down m8....not with an nforce 2 mobo, with those newer compnenets sucking juice outta it....

 

[imported_Kensai]

Yup, Yup. Those ECS people don't make great boards.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
Could also be the PSU not supplying enuf power ot the PSU could be defective or maybe the molex to the HD is loose. I had a 250gb sata drive that clicked all the time, turned out to be a bad molex somewhere in the chain. Ended up buying a new PSU. No more clicking.

I've had problems with loose molex splitters before. I thought that I had fixed them, but after doing some recent "shuffling" in my case, I had some HD reset/spinups occur again for the first time in months last night. Very disconcerting, your machine freezes entirely for a second, and you hear the "click, whirrrr..." as it spins up again. It could be the PSU freaking out on me too, I suppose, but if there were true - I would think that it would affect my DVD burning as well, or that going to burn a DVD would cause enough of a drop in power to trigger this, but since that hasn't occurred, I think it's more of a molex issue than anything.

 

[UptheMiddle]

Originally posted by: Biggerhammer

Originally posted by: corkyg
That type of clicking often is the sound of the actuator arm assembly and heads seeking to find some data that can't be found. Yep! Reinstall is probably in order for that software.

As a rule, never clone a drive until after you have optimized it - not just defrag - but optimize. That might have solved the problem in the first place.

What software do you use to optimize a drive?

Does anybody know the answer to this (optimizing a drive, not just defrag)?

 

[LIVAN]

Well fellas, the problem is back, even with new motherboard, so I am starting to think it's a bad molex. Should Will get a new one this afternoon, I actually had a failure with my video card saying it was not powerc onnected when it was. Put the cid card with another connector and it was fine. I don't think its my PSU as the computer is working fine.

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: LIVAN
Well fellas, the problem is back, even with new motherboard, so I am starting to think it's a bad molex. Should Will get a new one this afternoon, I actually had a failure with my video card saying it was not powerc onnected when it was. Put the cid card with another connector and it was fine. I don't think its my PSU as the computer is working fine.

Bummer. My PC had so many devices in it and many splitters when the HD problem happened. I ended up buying a PSU that had 10 connectors on it to eliminate splitters altogether. If you get a new PSU make sure it has plenty of connectors.