Is it RMA time? My WD 8.4 gig HD is randomly clicking

[KennyH]

I have a Western Digital 8.4 gig ATA66 HD that has been used for about a year that I bought retail. About every ten minutes of so the thing will make a loud click. Just once, but it is very annoying. Is this a sign of a dying HD? I have run WD's Diagnostics on it and it passed. Can I RMA it to WD even if it passed the diags? Has anyone ever experienced this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Duvie]

Yeah, its called the "click of death"....I had a seagate do it and yet all utilities said I was fine...A few weeks later all hell broke loose. It was a secondary drive and I burned a cd of contents prior to complete failure.

I think it is more mechanical portion of the drive and the utilites may not even look at it...I do not know the ins and outs of harddrive mechanics. This is the type of failure when it goes will be sudden and total.

 

[KennyH]

Thanks. Time for RMA.

 

[NascarFool]

Hmmm . . I have one doing that too. Not sure if it is the 13.6 or the 20 . Will have to remove one and see what happens. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[KennyH]

No problem, I called Western Digital and it has been sent back to them. Hopefully they will give me a new 8.4.

 

[Kp99]

My old 6.4 did this, just call WD and get a RMA.

 

[digi187]

yes.. do it quick...

Back anything you need off of it while it still works.

mine did this and i lost my friggin live music ftp server about a year ago

 

[Nestico]

In the past 6 months, out of 12 WD Caviar drives that I know of 3 went bad. Click of Death & nothing you can do to fix it..just be lucky if you can get some data off of it before it goes completely dead. I used to swear by WD, now I think I'm going to switch over to IBM.

 

[CTho9305]

This is louder than normal clicking from data access?

 

[BarnyardMonkey]

Hey i have 2 drives that do this every now and then.usually once or twice a day.

20G WD brand new
and a 5G Maxtor that was RMA'd about a year ago.
and they both did that from day 1.
both are still fine.

used the 20g now for about 4 months.

So this is for sure a sign that its going bad?seems like it would have went bad by now.
no grinding noise's or anything else,just that slight click noise.



Shawn.

 

[Johnnie]

i had the same problem with a 20G WD...I had it on the same leg as my Voodoo 5500... that card was sucking too much power..so i switched connections.. prob was gone

 

[Fermilevel]

Regardless of what WD says in their quality initiatives, I've had to return numerous WD drives for outright sudden failure shortly after the noise became noticeable. These drives are hard-sectored and the MBR is ultimately damaged. Fortunately, WD is good about RMA-ing their drives.

http://www.westerndigital.com/fitness/wdcaviarqual.html

A quote from WD's site:
"Western Digital has developed a firmware update to reduce the mechanical noise associated with our wear leveling feature. Several customers have contacted us about this increase in noise and their concern that the drive may be malfunctioning. Aside from the audible noise, this operation is normal and actually improves drive reliability by reducing the time a head spends in the same location when the drive is at idle. The wear leveling feature is non-destructive and the additional noise is not an indication of potential drive failure."

Hmmm...

 

[zzz234]

My 2 year old WD Caviar disk used to click about once a day for the last 6 months, but yesterday morning it started clicking continuously every second or so, which completely locked up he computer. The only way I could stop it was to switch the power off and then back on - resetting didn't work.

It now works for about half an hour at a time, then it goes mental again. Looks like I'm going to have to send it back.

 

[blues008]

send that puppy back.

blues