Weird HDD Noise

[SixFootEwok]

So, ever since I bought my drive (a 4TB HDD), there's a little click that sounds almost digital whenever it spins up (fairly certain it's still mechanical, though). I can't be sure it's a spinup noise, but it's always whenever something is being loaded - a webpage, whenever I start a Steam game, or program, etc. It's also doesn't sound everytime I load something, only when it seems like it's been asleep for a while. I had it happen not too long ago when a webpage was loading. The page was hung up for only a quarter of a second. I heard the click, and everything popped up.

Other info is that it's my second drive, first being a SSD. Everything is also coming back clean from Crystal Disk Info.

It's a sound other drives haven't made and a small part of my soul squints whenever it happens, but the drive has never had issues.

 

[junkeymonkey]

may look at hard drive click of death ? just hard to say ?? in my opinion a hard drive should run and sound like its not even there

you maybe right to suspect something's up ?? that's a judgment call you have to make and your data going on it

 

[SkyNetRising]

Post screenshot from hdtune health.

 

[ChaoticWolf]

Use crystaldiskinfo

 

[Solandri]

there's a little click that sounds almost digital whenever it spins up (fairly certain it's still mechanical, though). I can't be sure it's a spinup noise, but it's always whenever something is being loaded - a webpage, whenever I start a Steam game, or program, etc. It's also doesn't sound everytime I load something, only when it seems like it's been asleep for a while. I had it happen not too long ago when a webpage was loading. The page was hung up for only a quarter of a second. I heard the click, and everything popped up.

There are two HDD activities which cause the behavior I've put in bold.

• 
  ■ Hard drives go to sleep after a certain time of inactivity. This is a power-saving strategy. The platters spin down and only the electronics remain on. When the computer needs to access the drive, it freezes until the drive spins up - usually 2-4 seconds. How much it freezes depends on why it needs to access the drive. A low priority task like copying files in the background, you might not even notice it. But a high priority task like accessing the pagefile will cause Windows to completely freeze until the drive responds.
  
  There may be a small click at the start of the spin-up cycle, followed by a whir which increases in pitch as the platters increase in RPM. Finally the whir pitch stabilizes and there's a rattling noise as the read/write heads scan across their full range of motion to confirm everything is working properly. You can adjust the sleep timeout in Windows' power settings.
  ■ Hard drives park their heads - they swing the arm holding the read/write heads off to the side so they're no longer over the platters. This was originally a damage-prevention strategy in laptops. If you dropped the laptop while the heads were over the spinning drive, the impact could cause the heads to hit the platters and scratch the surface, literally scraping your data off the drive and turning them into tiny pieces of metallic dust.
  
  A parked head can be unparked quickly, but it still takes a fraction of a second. Usually 1/4 second to about 3/4 second. As with sleep, the extent to which Windows will freeze while it waits for the heads to unpark depends on the priority of the access request. There's a click associated with both the parking and the unparking.

In particular, some WD drives use a very aggressive head parking timeout - on the order of 10 seconds. Most other drives won't park the heads until a minute or several minutes of inactivity. Some concerns have been raised about the longevity of the r/w head actuator motor due to all this parking, but as WD is the manufacturer I have to figure they've tested it and they know what they're doing.

The bigger issue is the freezing. It's damned annoying when what you're doing freezes for a fraction of a second just because it's been more than 10 seconds since you last accessed the HDD. If yours is a WD drive, I wrote up a short batch file to test if it's head parking which is causing your noise and freezes. Ccreate a new file named test.bat on the drive making the noise containing the following:

:repeat
@echo %RANDOM% > tmp.txt
ping -n 8 127.0.0.1 > NUL
goto repeat

Then in a command prompt, run test.bat and leave it running. It writes a random number to the disk every 8 seconds, preventing the heads from parking. If this causes the noise and freezes to disappear, then you are indeed suffering from this problem.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to fix. Unlike the sleep timer, there's no direct way to modify this head parking behavior in Windows. It's baked into the drive's firmware.

• 
  ■You used to be able to fix it with a program WD put out called wdidle3.exe. But they redesigned their website a year ago and the page hosting it disappeared. You might still be able to find it elsewhere.
  ■You can just run the above batch file all the time..
  ■You can use CrystalDiskInfo and disable all the power management (APM) settings on the drive (move the slider to the right til it says FEh). It'll probably cost you a fraction of a Watt of extra power consumption, and on mine it would reset every few reboots and I'd have to do it again.
  http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html
  ■You can just replace the WD drive with a different drive (preferably a SSD). I've seen this behavior in all the WD laptop drives, WD green, SSHDs, and I suspect their Blue drives have it as well.