[SOLVED] New hard drives have starting making clicking noises ?

[Bongert]

i had a set of 6 x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives for some 3 years or something. While they are NAS drives, i didnt use them in a NAS but my PC, which i wouldnt keep running 24/7.
i never had any issues with noise up until a couple weeks ago, when one of the drives was suddenly starting to click very noticeably. This wasnt your usual read/write operation noise, but definitely out of the ordinary.

My first assumption was obviously that the drive was about to fail, but i could open the file explorer and access the data on the drive no problem. Even in disk management, i could still see all the drives are online and working. it was only when i opened CrystalDiskInfo to read out the SMART values that the drive suddenly got quiet again.

For the first couple of days, the drive would start making clicking noises out of nowhere and i would simply open CrystalDiskInfo to make it stop, but once a day quickly turned into once every half an hour.
I concluded the drive was going to fail soon, but because i didn't know which drive exactly was failing and I was planning a capacity upgrade anyways, i decided to rip out all the drives and replace them with
6 x 8TB ones.

Now to the fun part. the 8TB drives have been installed for two or three days now, none of the 6TB drives are in my PC, but just today i heard the drives making a clicking noise again. and this time it sounded like multiples of them. The noise is definitely not some read/write operation. i checked Task Manager and there was nothing going on on any of the drives, and again, same as with the old drives, simply launching
CrystalDiskInfo alleviates the clicking temporarily. but just in the time since typing this I've had the clicking come up twice.

Just sending all the drives back is kind of a bad solution IMO because I'd have to either use my old 6TB drives again or buy a whole new set of drives only to risk the drives not even being at fault in the first place.

i have a 1000W PSU that was intentionally very overspecced for my PC so that i could upgrade without having to worry about enough power. My motherboard only has 6 SATA ports, but effectively only four because two get turned off when an NVMe SSD installed.

I've installed SATA expansion cards to fit more drives in.
One might point at those as the culprit, but remember, ive been running this setup with my 6x6TB drives for 3 years without issue. its only been the last couple weeks that the clicking started.
Now its the third time since typing this up that the clicking appeared again. I've already gone so far as to just pin CrystalDiskInfo to my taskbar to launch it real quick.

Here are some specs:
6TB Drives: Seagate Ironwolf ST6000VN001
8TB Drives: Seagate Ironwolf ST8000VN002
PSU: Seasonic Prime TX-1000
Motherboard: MSI X570-A Pro
OS: Windows 10

 

[Lutfij]

i have a 1000W PSU that was intentionally very overspecced for my PC so that i could upgrade without having to worry about enough power.
+
PSU: Seasonic Prime TX-1000
How old is the PSU and what did it power prior to today?

i used SATA expansion cards to fit more drives in.
Got a link to the expansion cards you speak of? Make and model of your case?

one might point at those as the culprit, but remember, ive been running this setup with my 6x6TB drives for 3 years without issue. its only been the last couple weeks that the clicking started.
I had an issue with an A10-6800K + A85x-itx board whereby the chipset drivers would get corrupt and my drives would start to heat up and start clicking. I would try and manually reinstall your chipset and expansion card drivers in an elevated command and see if the issue persists.

Speaking of installing, did this issue crop up after an OS update?

 

[Bongert]

How old is the PSU and what did it power prior to today?

about 2 and a half years, and its been in this same PC since then. the only thing i changed since then was adding more storage and two more RAM sticks.

Got a link to the expansion cards you speak of? Make and model of your case?

i got two different makes, one of them is a Conceptronic EMRICK03G and the other two are these cheap chinese ones from amazon i cant tell with 100% certainty without disassembling my PC, but from what i can tell, only one of the HDDs is actually attached to one of those expansion cards. I was wrong about the motherboard sharing two SATA ports with the NVMe slot. the Mobo has one dedicated NVMe slot, which is the one i use. the other one, that is shared with the Sata ports is unpopulated. instead i have 5 drives attached to the motherboard directly, one of the six motherboard Sata headers remains unused due to me not having the right length cable at the time.
only one of the sata expansion cards is actually in use at the moment, the rest are only pre-installed, dont ask why.
and from what i can tell just by looking, i would say one of the chinese ones from amazon is being used for that one HDD. but like i said, it sounds like multiple different drives clicking, so even ones attached to the motherboard directly, so this might not be related to the sata cards at all.

I had an issue with an A10-6800K + A85x-itx board whereby the chipset drivers would get corrupt and my drives would start to heat up and start clicking. I would try and manually reinstall your chipset and expansion card drivers in an elevated command and see if the issue persists.

i will try and figure something out in this direction.

Speaking of installing, did this issue crop up after an OS update?

im installing my windows updates automatically, i dont really pay attention and cant tell you if the clicking started right after an update.

 

[Bob.B]

i had a set of 6x6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives for some 3 years or something. While they are NAS drives, i didnt use them in a NAS but my PC, which i wouldnt keep running 24/7.
i never had any issues with noise up until a couple weeks ago, when one of the drives was suddenly starting to click very noticeably. This wasnt your usual read/write operation noise, but definitely out of the ordinary.
My first assumption was obviously that the drive was about to fail, but i could open the file explorer and access the data on the drive no problem. Even in disk management, i could still see all the drives are online and working.
it was only when i opened crystal disk info to read out the SMART values that the drive suddenly got quiet again.
for the first couple of days, the drive would start making clicking noises out of nowhere and i would simply open crystal disk info to make it stop.
but once a day quickly turned into once every half an hour. i concluded the drive was going to fail soon, but because i didnt know which drive exactly was failing and i was planning a capacity upgrade anyways, i decided to rip out all drives and replace them with 6x8TB ones.

now to the fun part. the 8TB drives have been installed for two or three days now, none of the 6TB drives are in my PC, but just today i heard the drives making a clicking noise again. and this time it sounded like multiple of them.
the noise is definitely not some read/write operation. i checked task manager and there was nothing going on on any of the drives.
again, same as with the old drives, simply launching crystal disk info alleviates the clicking temporarily. but just in the time since writing this ive had the clicking come up twice.

just sending all the drives back is kind of a bad solution imo because id just have to either use my old 6TB drives again or buy a whole new set of drives only to risk the drives not even being at fault in the first place.

i have a 1000W PSU that was intentionally very overspecced for my PC so that i could upgrade without having to worry about enough power.
my motherboard only has 6 SATA ports, but effectively only four because two get turned off for the NVMe SSD.
i used SATA expansion cards to fit more drives in.
one might point at those as the culprit, but remember, ive been running this setup with my 6x6TB drives for 3 years without issue. its only been the last couple weeks that the clicking started.
now its the third time since writing this up that the clicking appeared again. ive already gone so far as to just pin crystal disk info to my taskbar to launch it real quick.

Here are some specs:
6TB Drives: Seagate Ironwolf ST6000VN001
8TB Drives: Seagate Ironwolf ST8000VN002
PSU: Seasonic Prime TX-1000
Motherboard: MSI X570-A Pro
OS: W10

Just to get it out of the mix look at your power plan and set the hdd power off to zero.

 

[Bongert]

Just to get it out of the mix look at your power plan and set the hdd power off to zero.

just checked, it was already set to 0.

 

[Bongert]

I had an issue with an A10-6800K + A85x-itx board whereby the chipset drivers would get corrupt and my drives would start to heat up and start clicking. I would try and manually reinstall your chipset and expansion card drivers in an elevated command and see if the issue persists.

ive tried installing the drivers here, the first one installed fine, i rebooted and waited for the clicking to start again, and it did. so those drivers at least didnt work for me.
i tried the next two in the list but they wouldnt even install because my system isnt configured in RAID mode. im using windows software RAID. in the meantime ill try installing the drivers for those sata cards.

 

[Ralston18]

@Bongert

Is all important data on any and all drives backed up to locations away from the host system and drives in question?

You need at least 2 x backups proved to be recoverable and readable.

And there should be no need for any RAID of any configuration.

 

[Bongert]

ive tried installing the driver for the conceptronic sata card, which didnt help. the other cards apparently dont have a driver, at least thats what its saying on the amazon page. the asmedia driver the amazon page mentions a little earlier is already installed.

 

[Bongert]

also did a proper BIOS update now, didnt help either.

 

[Bongert]

i tried sfc /scannow and it found some corrupt files that it couldnt repair. after running some DISM command i got sfc /scannow to work and repair the corrupt file, but it didnt change a thing about the clicking

 

[Ralston18]

Fair enough but the question remains: do you have your data backed up and proven recoverable?

Consider that the drive(s) in question will fail in 5, 4, 3..... seconds.

 

[Bongert]

Fair enough but the question remains: do you have your data backed up and proven recoverable?

Consider that the drive(s) in question will fail in 5, 4, 3..... seconds.

the data is safe, no worries.

 

[Bongert]

Been a while since i got a reply here. tried troubleshooting on my own regardless. ive tried a bunch of different things. im not sure i can remember everything i did.
I tried the following:
-Uninstalling windows updates from the past 3 months
-wiping the drives off all their data and partitions and cleaning them up with diskpart
-removing all sata expansion cards from the system and only connecting a single HDD to the motherboard SATA headers
-i tried using that built in reset feature in windows where it retains all the data but does a fresh install of windows itself as well as uninstalling all the software, but i couldnt get this to work.
-methodically trying each hard drive, with each sata port and each cable i own

what ultimately worked, but is also the nuclear option i hoped to avoid, is to do a fresh install of windows.
this doesnt really help me because im still none the wiser. i already knew it couldnt be the drives themselves, as they are factory new. i already knew that it had to be something software related.
i havent done so yet, but i expect the clicking to resume as soon as i reinstall my backup again.
i know the best answer i have right now is to simply start from scratch and manually reinstall everything, hoping the clicking doesnt happen again....but i kinda dont wanna...
it would be a huge pain in the ass and i would rather figure out what was causing the problem in the first place.
i already verified the integrity of my windows installation and the entire boot drive. so i have no idea what the issue might be.

funnily enough, somewhere along the way i developed a little band aid fix to the clicking. remember how the clicking magically stops as soon as i open crystal disk info? i basically wrote a script that periodically launches crystal disk info as a minimized window, then closes it again a couple seconds later. this way the clicking never gets the chance to manifest. but i obviously dont want to run my system with hacky solutions like that.

i would gladly appreciate if anyone has any idea left for what could be the cause.

 

[Ralston18]

Any error codes, warnings, or even informational events being captured via Reliability History/Monitor or Event Viewer?

Especially any entries when the disks are clicking?

Or your scrip/band aid is runninng or not running?

Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) may prove helpful in spotting some change or changes that correspond with the use of your script.

My thought is to look for anything that happens (or stops happening) when the disks click or stop clicking.

Curious about your script: are you able to post the script?

 

[Misgar]

I've had several drives die from the dreaded "Click of Death". Let's hope your drives aren't on their way out too.
https://www.howtogeek.com/832396/what-is-the-click-of-death-in-an-hdd-and-what-should-you-do/

When I have any concerns about a hard disk, I run a read-only surface test using Hard Disk Sentinel. Takes around 12 hours on an 8TB drive. In more extreme cases, I'll run a combined write/read test (24 hours on 8TB).
https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/61_surfacetest.html

You'll probably need to purchase the full version of HD Sentinal to run these surface scans, but you can perform some tests using the trial version. The screen shot below is from an unregistered copy of the software.

 

[Bongert]

after a lot of testing im pretty sure to have found the issue. and it was the most unlikely culprit, at least in my opinion, which is why it took me so long to figure it out.
it was Fan Control, a tool for, well, controlling fans.
ive reinstalled windows a couple of times and reinstalled all my software piece by piece and waited for the clicking to start again. took me three reinstallations until i noticed it was fan control of all things causing the issue.
my best guess is that the software is probing the hard drive temp sensors which causes the read-write-head to spring into action, only for it to go into parking again a minute later. while watching resource monitor, i noticed a very short activity going on on all the drives, despite them being fully formatted. and a couple seconds later the clicking would start. like i said, i think fan control is trying to probe the thermal sensors, and the noise im hearing is just constant head parking.
ive turned off fan control for now and will probably just wait a while for a new version or something. its not that critical of a software to me to bother opening a ticket on their github.
what a wild goose chase this was though...