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Hard Drive "stuns" system

M

micrometers

Diamond Member
I have a new system with a 120 gb SSD and 2tb hard drive.

the hard drive occasionally seems to stun the system.

It will make this clicking sound and hte entire system will freeze up for a moment.

Sometimes this results in program crahses. what is going on?
 
Sounds like the HDD firmware has detected bad sectors and the HDD system runs into trouble (ie, freezes) during the automatic attempt at error correction/sector reallocation.

You probably should run some detailed diagnostic evaluations of the HDD (ie, dedicate the whole computer system to HDD testing).

Depending on the results, you may want or need to RMA the drive.
 
And you should backup the drive if you have any important data aboard.
 
Yes, time for backup and diagnostics. In my experience, once a hard drive starts acting up in any way, it's time for a replacement; it's not going to heal itself. 🙂

Get a SMART utility and see what it says about the drive.
Or go to the HD manufacturer's website and see what kind of diagnostic utilities they have. They will probably have one, if for no other reason than for warranty purposes, so that they can get a diagnostic code from the drive before it ever sets foot in their facility.


I had issues with a 1.5TB drive recently - read attempts on certain files would stall out the program doing the reading, and then the drive would disappear completely from Explorer. Western Digital's DataLifeguard software gave a "too many bad sectors" error. And the SMART did its usual job of being informative, but otherwise useless, as it said "OK" for everything, even though both the Reallocation Event Count and Pending Reallocated Sectors numbers were a good bit higher than normal.
 
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Are you sure the 2tb drive isn't simply powering down from not being in use? Does it only "stun" the system when you try to access that drive when you haven't in a while? It could simply be the hard drive powering up.
 
1. Backup critical data
2. Run disk drive diagnostics
3. Goobernoodles could be right as well. I have a 1.5TB Seagate 5900RPM, it puts itself to sleep. When i leave it alone for a while, then access it again, it clicks once and spins up.
 
I should say it isn't a click of death. I don't know quite how to describe it. It's a lot like grinding gears, like if you turn a wind-up toy the opposite way
 
i've had this before and it was bad sectors. doesn't happen if it's connected externally though.

as others said, copy your data to another drive and run checks
 
Whenever something like you describe happens, a decision needs to be made. Either live with the situation until what is going on and solution clarifies (ie, becomes more evident) or replace the HDD with a drive that is more compatible with your system. (I usually do the latter.)

If you trust the reliability of the current HDD to be used as a backup, then keep it and put it in an external enclosure (in which case it may cease to exhibit the "clicking"/freezing syndrome).
 
C1 said:
Whenever something like you describe happens, a decision needs to be made. Either live with the situation until what is going on and solution clarifies (ie, becomes more evident) or replace the HDD with a drive that is more compatible with your system. (I usually do the latter.)

If you trust the reliability of the current HDD to be used as a backup, then keep it and put it in an external enclosure (in which case it may cease to exhibit the "clicking"/freezing syndrome).
Click to expand...

Yeah, computer parts are weird in how they malfunction.

The stunning is not predictable so I dunno what it is. I mean, the two diagnostics I ran came up clean, what other program can I use?
 
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