Hard Drive Clicking

Ok i just traded my friend a old 100Mhz Laptop for a 60GB 7200RPM Hard Drive to replace my 40GB 5400RPM, He said that there was a cluster damaged however it should not affect the preformance unless i fill up the drive, after about a week of use i start to notice that the drive is cliciking once every 20min. Any suggestions or comments.

well, the clicking is exactly what it will be doing with a damaged cluster. It WILL get worse... Right now it is just going to click when it accesses tha sector and later it will be worse. IMO get rid of it if you still can

Sorry Ronin but that fried tried to pull a fast one on you.

Get you lappy back.

If you mount the drive vertically, theres a chance you'll have a slightly longer life in that drive. I did this with a maxtor bigfoot (yeah, its really old!) and it still runs, though its only chuggin along as a teamspeak server.

But about the click- thats a sure sign of impending failure.

This isn't one of those old IBM "Deathstar" drives, is it? One of the ones that caused people to try to force IBM to reimburse them, after about 5% of 'em went bad (the acceptacle percentage of failed drives is usually less than 1%)?

it still preforms like a dream though, how will it fail? just by getting slower? could it also be because its fraggmented

There's only so much metal hitting metal will happen before the mechanical part of it starts failing further on you. It will be too late when you have that drive filled up with important stuff and it goes on you.

The clicking is usually just the sound of the head seeking back and forth over the same spot trying to read the bad sector. Not necessarily metal hitting metal. If that were happening, I would give the drive about 5 minutes.

hmm and what would be clicking... Put a scratched-up CD in the drive and hear the head click.... skip bad sector, return to initial position and so on.... I give his drive a month or two before it gets unbearable.

Umm, no. Mounting the drive vertically will stress the bearings unevenly. Mounting it flat distributes the weight of the platters.

I have seen those old BigFoot drives run for a long, long time. We came across several at work and ran full tests on them. They passed even though they're like what? 6-7 years old? Used in server apps no less. I mean not just for teamspeak, but full-time heavy-duty use. We were tempted for a while with the thought of a BigFoot RAID, lol.

Acually, I think sitting vertically, there would be less stress on the bearings than you think (but probably not less than with horizontal placement). The centripital force of the platters spinning at over 7000RPM will alieviate (sp?) some stress, but gravity will prevent it from balancing perfectly. t is true taht sitting horizontally the platters will sit more evenly, and gravity will have less effect on the bearings as the platters will be spinning perpendicularly to the earth's gravitational pull. Most of this does depend on the ball bearing mechanism however, as different designs can place the bearings at different spots and affect how much stress is put on them. In general though I would say horizontal arrangement is best.

RONINBLADE'

I'm not sure how my drives got damaged but they started clicking (clunking) and they failed right away. I would suggest that you back up if you havent allready and then buy a new drive. You are running on borrowed time.

Bob

the only thing i use my 60GB is for apps, all my other stuff is on my 200GB. Hmm it seems like the drive has stopped making noices.

The drive saw all the posts here and got scared that you might get rid of it like the previous owner did.

I've got a WD120SE that started grinding away about 5 months ago or more and so I bought a Barracuda 120SATA to replace it but it's been running as a secondary drive with trivial shit on it and still has yet to fail. ya never know how long it could last but backing it up immediately should be your top priority because like these guys said it could go pretty much at any time.