Brand new HDD single clicking sound every couple minutes

[Valamyr]

Brought this to replace a failing system disk recently: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM 64MB SATA 6Gbps 3.5IN Internal Hard Drive - OEM - DirectCanada

Disk seems to perform great, no errors and decent benchmarks according to HDD tune. Im also using a SSD as smartcache for the drive.

Only tiny issue; every two or three minutes, it makes a very short but quite audible clicking noise. Heavy activity or idleness doesn't seem to increase or decrease the frequency, and its not a wake or sleep noise (besides I have HDDs set to never sleep). Sometimes it does do it just as I start something that'll require HDD use, such as a benchmark, though.

I dont work with alot of hardware and I dunno if this is a sign of a problem or normal behavior. All my drives have always been rather silent aside from normal spinning noise unless they had an issue so just to put my mind at ease I wanted other people's opinions.

[Adzsask]

Ya, I have owned many seagate drives and clicking always means death is near in my experience.

[Valamyr]

Originally Posted by Adzsask

Ya, I have owned many seagate drives and clicking always means death is near in my experience.

*sigh* Thats what I feared. So much for being done messing with all this for awhile. Spent 5 hours getting my install all shiny too... but hey, shit happens.

Seems Ill have to choose between a DirectCanada RMA or a Seagate RMA. Anyone knows whats better? I didnt RMA much stuff in my life, last time I had much better service from EVGA than NCIX (ie, manufacturer over merchant), so even if Im in my 30 days (3 days actually), I wonder who I should bug first? Any chance to get either to send me a replacement and leave with the bad drive rather than the yucky 'send us the drive back at your expense and if we think its bad we'll send you a new one'?

Also, my RMA case remains quite flimsy since neither HD tune nor Chkdsk shows anything wrong. Anyone can suggest any other diagnostic tools I could try that might demonstrate that this is a problem to the vendor, or hell, even to myself? :) Thanks a ton everyone.

[Valamyr]

For a test, I disabled the SSD smartcache about 25 minutes ago it stopped clicking. I figured this might be due to the fact it's under extra-stress while a caching device tries to write on it, so I write-benched it again, and then moved about three dozen gigs worth of data on it, and so far, not a single click... and I cant remember it clicking before the SSD caching was enabled either.

I'm quite relieved obviously as this means the disk is probably fine. I'm rather confused as to the cause, though. Obviously its not the SSD that was clicking...

I'll wipe the SSD and then try again, and keep you posted. Appreciate all your help. <3

[Valamyr]

After wiping the SSD and re-enabling it still no clics! Am very happy

I -guess- that the cache SSD might have been trying to read i/o's from my old disk which is no longer plugged in. I should probably have wiped it before re-enabling as a caching device for the new drive. I assumed the Intel caching software would be able to tell the difference between two different disks, but if it didn't and was trying to fetch data at places where it's obviously not... well... I'd be clicking too if I was that poor HDD. :p

Sooo, you guys can decide if this counts as a software issue or a user issue, but as for me, I'm happy it seems all worked out and I'm going to celebrate this with some Crown Royal Black

[Adzsask]

Wow that's an odd case, i am guessing bad firmware or corruption of SSD?? ... I am running 2 seagate HDD's and an SSD as we speak and never heard any clicking ever.