Ticking noise.

[Foxx]

I have recently been having this ticking noises coming from my hard drive... It ticks twice then waits for about ten minutes and ticks again. Any help on this?

 

[Codesmith]

Sometimes drives do that when they overheat, its not a good thing.

It could also be the start of mechanical failure leading ultimately to the click of death.

Check the drives smart status. Burn copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Run a extended diagnostic test on the drive to see if it needs replaced.

 

[Sonic_Reducer]

that's usually not a good sign , i think you hd it's getting ready to die that sound it's something mechanical inside, do backups and get a new one because that one is almos dead....:S

 

[PCcashCow]

Depending on your OS, you may beable to get a log for Event Viewer. I suggest getting your hands on copy of ghost and shop for a new drive.

 

[kyman73]

Wait so would you guys consider it bad that my new Raid 0 drives kinda sound like that. They will tick, then whiz, like you can hear it spinning, they do this pretty much constantly.. It is my first Raid so I just figured it was normal...

 

[Sonic_Reducer]

no raid drives should sound just like a normal drive no thicking sound that thick usually menas the drive or it's dead lol or getting ready to... drives should make some sound but not thick.... that's bad :S

 

[kyman73]

hmm alrgiht I'm going to check it again when I get home from work. Could they be overheating? My ambient case temp isn't high, but the drives are close together in there.

 

[MCGTech]

I have recently been having this ticking noises coming from my hard drive... It ticks twice then waits for about ten minutes and ticks again. Any help on this?

Come on guys, I'm getting tired of this format it /replace it knee jerk mentality. Whatever happened to FIX IT? Three things may be happening:

1) The drive is going bad..(old, overheated, etc.) replace it Check the manufacturer's website for a diagnostic utility first.

2) The drive is badly fragmented (anyone mention this? NO!!) Other than Windows' defrag, use something like Diskeeper bootime defrag. In addition, when badly fragmented, the OS will create a seconf MDFAT table which some lesser defrag programs will not touch.. keep up with it!

3) You have a physically bad sector on the hard disk. run chkdsk /f/r to test and lock it out if found.



A side tip: Windows Indexing service if activated will scan your drives on a regular basis. Turning it off helped on a couple of laptops. I turn it off on all of my desktop machines and use Google desktop instead.

 

[michaelahess]

Usually if the sound is: tick, tick, pause a sec, tick, tick

it's the heads returning to home, they will sometime park themselves to verify alignment. This is bad, it means the drive is noticing that the heads are moving off track while reading data, usually heat causes this, or bumps while running. Laptop drives experience this a lot when failing.

Run the manufactures diag disk and it will tell you for sure. The os error logs are usually less specific, and lots of times smart errors aren't even reported, course you have to make sure it's turned on in the bios.

 

[guyinyourattic37]

hmmm.. sound like you have gnomes in you hard drive. Nuthing a slegdhammer won't fix.

 

[kyman73]

Alright I lied its not ticking, but it does make a high pitched whine, it sounds like a CDRW drive when its burning at max speed were it will speed up/ slow down every 5-10 seconds.

I have 3 WD caviar 250gb HD's
1 single
and a Raid 0

I had the single first and never heard a sound out of it, but he Raid 0 is making the above noise, just making sure this isn't a sign of some defect (new to raids).

 

[derek2006]

Ticking = Soon to be dead hard drive. I have learned that 3 times in the past with a 46.6 gig IBM deskstar, a 10 gig Quantium Fireball and a 80 gig WD.

 

[michaelahess]

RAID makes no difference, I'd run wd diag tool and see what it says, boot the machine with only one hd at a time and see if you can identify the noisy drive first though.

 

[sailer]

Alright I lied its not ticking, but it does make a high pitched whine, it sounds like a CDRW drive when its burning at max speed were it will speed up/ slow down every 5-10 seconds.

I have 3 WD caviar 250gb HD's
1 single
and a Raid 0

I had the single first and never heard a sound out of it, but he Raid 0 is making the above noise, just making sure this isn't a sign of some defect (new to raids).

A couple things I can think of. One, the hard drives and/or the cages are not screwed in solid, so that everytime they engage, there is a sound from the drive moving back and forth in its mount. Two, someone hid a time bomb in there and its waiting to blow up the drive. Three, the high pitched whine is what you'll do when the drive quits, you realize that all that stuff you didn't back up is gone forever, and your credit card is required to buy new hard drives.

One last thought. If by chance you placed both drives too close together, they might be suffering a heat problem which causes momentary stopages of the spinning hard disc. Put a fan in place to blow air over the drives, then prepare for number three above, cause you'll be whining before too long.

OF course, I might be wrong about all this

 

[Duriem]

Hi I'm new to this forum and I have similar problem as OP, but the sound is more like clicking noise and it only makes this noise once or twice whenever I cold boot my PC in the morning. As I continue using my PC for general purposes, it eventually stops and strange thing is it only makes this noise when I haven't touched my PC for a while, it's been normal(no noise)after things got warmed up. And it's been like this for more than 8 months now. No sign of HD dying. I have already backed up my important stuffs but I don't really get why it acts strange like this. BTW, drive is Maxtor 80GB Sata, I have 2 of those in RAID0. Do you guys happened to have any ideas?

 

[derek2006]

I have had an external HD for quite awile now and it will have long clicking sessions to when its not being used. Its a Seagate 160 gig. I think its normal. Download a program called speedfan and have it check to see if the HD s S.M.A.R.T. software isnt reporting any errors or problems.

 

[Duriem]

Thanks for your reply, I have installed speedfan but unfortunately my sata drives do not report any S.M.A.R.T status. Only backup drive connected to IDE port does. I have enabled S.M.A.R.T in bios, but it didn't make any difference. BTW, the noise is quite big, it's hard to explain in words but it sounds as if metal arm is hitting something really hard. I have owed some HDD in the past, but I've never heard any noises like this before. It's really scaring me.

 

[SerbianBoy_Mylo]

Replace that hard drive!!! The ticking noise coming from mechanical brake on hard-drive reading head and it can`t be repared. It`s a big risk using that HDD. Back up your data and buy a new one. NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Duriem]

Thanks, that's what I thought too, so I made a quick back up of important stuffs but strangely after 8 months, it's still alive and there seems no trouble apart from hearing this noise once or twice a day. The hardrive now only contains OS and some installs of my favourite games so losing them doesn't give me much trouble, but I simply can not figure why it does this when it's cold and not after it's got warmed up. And the noise is quite annoying.

 

[PsMaster]

Well if the hard drive was damaged you probably can't fix it. The other thing I had just now is the hard drive just stopped working and was making ticking sounds, thought it's a dead disk... but what I did was get an adapter (docking station my case) for the sata disk, connected through e-sata when windows are running (win 7 my case), open the computer management, press action -> rescan disks, the drive appears. At first you might get a few messages that the drive is corrupt or is unreadable (RAW file system status)... after a few tries I get a message that I need to format it. Try running the quick format first, then do the full format. Now the ticking stopped and I can use my hdd again

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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