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hard drive head chattering

G

Gustavus

Golden Member
This computer -- my mainstay -- is pretty old, still uses ATA hard drives for example and RAMBUS memory if you remember that far back. I recently replaced a 200GB Maxtor with a new 500GB Seagate. Can't buy those anymore either, but I had one in a clamshell in the supply cabinet. Everything works perfectly -- but!

The head in the drive chatters -- just a click-- pretty much all of the time. The HD LED on the front of the case never shows any activity, not even a flicker.

Hard Disk Sentinel reports

"The hard disk status is PERFECT. Problematic or weak sectors were not found and there are no spin up or data transfer errors."

Hard Disk Inspector reports

"100% good"

As best I can tell from well over 100 hours of actual operation since the upgrade, everything is working perfectly.

But the damn head still chatters.

Any suggestions -- other than I should buy a more up to date machine -- appreciated.
 
Gustavus said:
The head in the drive chatters -- just a click-- pretty much all of the time.
Click to expand...

I had the same issue with a Seagate 500 SATA disk. No problems were found and the disk worked okay for about a year. Then it suddenly died. Consider having a backup just in case.

Edit.
My model was ST3500620AS.
It was checked with Linux at the time with "e2fsck -cvy".
 
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Seagate ST3500630A

ABIT TH7II

BIOS : 10/14/2003-i850-W83627HF-6A69SA1BC-EH

Last BIOS issued. ABIT has been out of business for many years now

Windows XP with SP 3 and all updates until Microsoft gave up supporting Windows XP

The processor is an Intel Pentium 4 rated 1.8 GHz, but has operated rock solid overclocked to 2.4 GHz for over a decade.
 
I think you need to run a full scan with Seatools. If your definition of click is the same as mine, you should be seeing some errors on a full scan.

A hard drive click is usually the actuator arm hitting the physical stop in an attempt to read a bad track on a platter. Eventually, this will cause the death of the drive.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. SeaTools gives the drive a clean bill of health

"Congratulations, your Seagate product has passed an important diagnostic test."

But the head still clicks almost all the time

Ran the longer test with the same "pass" message, so SeaTools doesn't find anything wrong with the drive.
 
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That's good. I have had drives over the years make more noise than the others, and it wasn't the click of death, it was just a noisy drive. Hopefully, that that is all you are hearing.
 
Thanks to all who responded. The computer seems to be working just fine, but all that clicking is not normal so I am going to pull another drive from one of the old machines here in the lab and replace it. Makes me nervous to think I could loose a paper midway through writing it.

Again, your help was much appreciated.
 
Gustavus said:
Thanks to all who responded. The computer seems to be working just fine, but all that clicking is not normal so I am going to pull another drive from one of the old machines here in the lab and replace it. Makes me nervous to think I could loose a paper midway through writing it.

Again, your help was much appreciated.
Click to expand...


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