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is this the wd click of death?

OBLAMA2009

OBLAMA2009

Diamond Member
i just bought a wd blakc 750 gig hd and i can hear a low level tap coming from it. i dont mean the usual humming from a hard drive. it seems to be working fine, but im wondering if this normal or does it mean this drive is headed for an early death
 
The drive will be fine. I think what youre hearing is the automation for controlling drive power down when not in use. To check this, let the drive sit idle (ie, let the system alone for 30 minutes), then try accessing (files on) the drive. There will be a response delay, then a click or tap, then you might be able to hear the drive spin up & then the window for the drive/files will appear. On WD drives I have I believe that the click or tap happens both at power/spin down as well as power/spin up.
 
I had two of the notorious 80GB WD 'click'o'death' drives. One crashed fast after the clicking started, the other clicked on for 3 years before giving up the ghost. Some times, it was like my computer was diesel powered...it became a challenge to see how long the sucker would last after a while.
 
there is no "WD click of death", there is just "click of death", it happens to ALL drives from ALL makers.
WD builds highly reliable drives, so they don't get the click of death that often. but they sometimes do.
The click of death is when the drive does not work at all and you hear your drive clicking repeatedly. since your drive actually works, then it isn't the click of death. It is a different sounding click that is caused by its operation.
 
I have several WD drives from Black to Green and a couple of notebook drives. I've heard clicks on just about all of them but it's a faint click - not the CoD. From reading about the green and power saving features I have written it off as the head parking after going idle, but they all work perfectly. Not sure if you have ever heard the CoD but if or when you do there won't be any mistake about it. Unless you get errors or hear a serious metallic clank I probably wouldn't worry about it.
 
WD drives gets the "click of death" (ha-ha) very often.


Fortunately, what you are experiencing is likely not a bad click. Drives have mechanical, moving parts inside them so there will naturally be some noise from the movement of the heads no matter what.


The click of death is actually pretty simple to explain:

Basically the click is the shock absorption system doing it's job as the heads load and unload from the platters rapidly. Why are they doing this? Because they can't read either the sector requested, or the Servo data on the platters. So they will "reboot" and try again. Some drives have information stored in the masked ROM in the cpu that has intructions on what to do. "Try 3 times, and then power cycle, and try 3 more, do this 4 times then idle" Something like that, obviously not in those exact words (it will all be in binary/hex in the ROM)
 
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