Solved HDD click sounds

PerpetualCycle · May 26, 2025

Sheikh said:
it's blue (Good)
temperature: 30 degrees

Are all the smart statistics good? Wdc has a tool where you can run smart short and long self tests on the hard drives. That caught a failing drive for me once. But if the smart data and those tests run clean, I wouldn't worry about it failing.

spapakons · May 26, 2025

cheaterslick said:
Thing is when an HDD starts to fail, you could still have time to recover your data.

When an SSD starts to fail, that's it. It's all or nothing, unless that concept has changed in the last few years and I don't know about it.

SSDs may also suffer from "avalanche effect". I don't remember details to explain it exactly, see here:

What is avalanche in MOSFET? (avalanche capability) | Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation | Europe(EMEA)

If a voltage exceeding the absolute maximum rated drain-source voltage V<sub>DSS</sub> is applied to the MOSFET, it will enter the breakdown region and will be destroyed. However, some products allow V<sub>DSS</sub> to be exceeded under the prescribed conditions described in the datasheet. This...

toshiba.semicon-storage.com

spapakons · May 26, 2025

PerpetualCycle said:
Are all the smart statistics good? Wdc has a tool where you can run smart sort and long self tests on the hard drives. That caught a failing drive for me once. But if the smart data and those tests run clean, I wouldn't worry about it failing.

After you see 100% health in Crystal Disk or Hard Disk Sentinel, there might be other reasons to suspect the drive is not perfect. In that case run the short test. If it fails, replace ASAP. If it passes the short test, run the long test to see if the surface of the drive has any issues.

cheaterslick · May 26, 2025

spapakons said:
SSDs may also suffer from "avalanche effect".

Never heard anything like that. That link doesn't say anything about data recovery, which was what I was getting at.

Scannerman · May 26, 2025

Sheikh said:
it's blue (Good)
temperature: 30 degrees

Personally, if Crystal Disk reports the drive as good and in the blue I wouldn't worry about it much. Sometimes SMART is just too smart for it's own good. I mean, you could get plenty of years out of that drive yet and if you've already run repairs on it and there are no failure reports I wouldn't sweat it. If you were using it in a commercial server or something of that nature (which you wouldn't because it's not really made for that) then there might be cause for concern. If you could make a recording of the sound and link to it here I'd give it a listening. I've heard hundreds and hundreds of hard drives. It really is starting to sound like you might simply be hearing chatter which is completely normal. Drives can get rather noisy at times, such as when they defrag. When you start running out of space sometimes the drive is shuffling and rewriting data to make more room. That could be what is happening. Myself, I wouldn't worry about it. Treat it like a happy, over-exuberant friend. OR, put it in an enclosure and keep as an external storage drive for another 5 years like I did with mine before I gave it to my daughter.

PerpetualCycle · May 26, 2025

cheaterslick said:
Never heard anything like that. That link doesn't say anything about data recovery, which was what I was getting at.

It is called write amplification, What it means is that writing a block of data from the host computer to an SSD can result in multiple blocks written internally in the SSD.

PerpetualCycle · May 26, 2025

Sheikh said:
Yes, Windows runs a trim command after defragmentation and consolidation.
Do you know why?
what's the difference between this HDD and those old ones?
is it better to have 1 partition on this kind of HDDs?.

Oversimplified but I am trying to be concise.

In conventional magnetic recording (CMR), there is a one-to-one sequential relationship between the logical block numbers (LBN) the operating system understands, and the actual physical location of the blocks in the hard drive - data blocks on the hard drive are never moved internally in CMR. Deletes are handled entirely by the operating system by flagging the deleted logical blocks as deleted - the drive never needs to know about the deleted blocks and the old data in the block is not erased on the drive. The OS will just overwrite deleted flagged logical blocks as needed, which overwrites the old data. This is why deleted data can be often recovered on CMR drives.

The Windows OS works the same way with SSD and SMR, except these drives do move data around internally which causes some issues and necessitates support for deletes in the TRIM command, which is sent to the drive by the host (dynamically with NTFS).

SSD drives and device based SMR HDDs need to move the data around internally for space management and performance purposes. They maintain an internal mapping between the LBN known by the OS and the actual physical block the data is actually stored in, so there is an additional level of indirection compared to CMR. But now the drives need to know about deletes so they can manage space internally, because the OS now cannot. This is the reason for the TRIM command. When you delete blocks that are on an SSD for example, the TRIM command sends a list of the logical blocks that are deleted to the SSD. The SSD then maps the LBN to the physical block and flags it as deleted so it can reuse that space.

Shingled magnetic recording was first introduced on magnetic tape media as far as I am aware (I was responsible for the management of hundreds of Petabytes of shingled tape). Writing data onto tracks on a magnetic medium has a physical limitation on the minimum width of a track due to the magnetic field generated by the head to magnetize the media. Reading a track can be narrower because there is no magnetic field being generated by the head. Shingled recording takes advantage of this condition by overlapping tracks when writing. Each consecutive track is overlapped with the previous track. This results in readable adjacent tracks of approximately half the width the write head can write, and they can be read fine. The trouble comes when you want to overwrite a block on track. If you write to the 1/2 width track with the write head, it will also overwrite an adjacent tracks data. too This is what makes them very different from CMR.

Device based SMR divides the disk into zones which they treat as a unit for writing. They also reserve disk space for a cache that gets directly written to from the hoist, then moved to a CMR zone when the drive is idle. Anyhow, there is no one to one mapping to the data like SSD, but it is quite different. I don't know much about the internals of this since I have never really used SMR drives and never will. They were created when there was a technology gap limiting the capacity of hard drives. But then helium filled drives that permitted platters to be closer together and hence more platters soon came into being. You can get very high capacity CMR drives now. The only thing SMR has going is they are slightly cheaper. It seems in the consumer space, the niche for SMR is in the low-end smaller capacity drives, just for cost savings.

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-shingled-magnetic-recording-hdd-technology.pdf

Cheers

PerpetualCycle · May 27, 2025

Scannerman said:
I'm well acquainted with drive chatter and agree that this happens with some mechanical hard drives. In the case I refer to the drive actually makes the classic 'click of death' sound. The classic click of death sound is a "click-click" followed by a pause and then a "click-click" and so on. One would not really refer to it as chatter. Drive chatter sounds much like an old coffee peculator running at the end of its cycle. In fact, the drive that I'm referring to used to chatter before it started making the classic click of death sound. This stopped when it was moved into a different USB enclosure and ran for another five years without chatter. It's still running today! We've been waiting for that old Toshiba to die for many years now but as soon as the OS boots the storage drive stops complaining. It's just one of those more rare sorts of phenomena.

At any rate if anyone has a drive that behaves this way they should not use it for anything essential. My daughter uses is as a secondary back up for her older operating systems (Win 7, Win 8, and File History) and feeds it duplicate files for 'just in case'. She runs everything in legacy/MBR and has 5 different OS to choose from. No matter the OS that old drive makes that sound until she is done booting. The drive is definitely defective. Crystal Disk advises replacement.

Yes. I think the "click of death" is from the head actuator moving the head back and forth trying to read a bad sector, or the actuator itself failing.

Scannerman · May 27, 2025

PerpetualCycle said:
Oversimplified but I am trying to be concise.

In conventional magnetic recording (CMR), there is a one-to-one sequential relationship between the logical block numbers (LBN) the operating system understands, and the actual physical location of the blocks in the hard drive - data blocks on the hard drive are never moved internally in CMR. Deletes are handled entirely by the operating system by flagging the deleted logical blocks as deleted - the drive never needs to know about the deleted blocks and the old data in the block is not erased on the drive. The OS will just overwrite deleted flagged logical blocks as needed, which overwrites the old data. This is why deleted data can be often recovered on CMR drives.

The Windows OS works the same way with SSD and SMR, except these drives do move data around internally which causes some issues and necessitates support for deletes in the TRIM command, which is sent to the drive by the host (dynamically with NTFS).

SSD drives and device based SMR HDDs need to move the data around internally for space management and performance purposes. They maintain an internal mapping between the LBN known by the OS and the actual physical block the data is actually stored in, so there is an additional level of indirection compared to CMR. But now the drives need to know about deletes so they can manage space internally, because the OS now cannot. This is the reason for the TRIM command. When you delete blocks that are on an SSD for example, the TRIM command sends a list of the logical blocks that are deleted to the SSD. The SSD then maps the LBN to the physical block and flags it as deleted so it can reuse that space.

Shingled magnetic recording was first introduced on magnetic tape media as far as I am aware (I was responsible for the management of hundreds of Petabytes of shingled tape). Writing data onto tracks on a magnetic medium has a physical limitation on the minimum width of a track due to the magnetic field generated by the head to magnetize the media. Reading a track can be narrower because there is no magnetic field being generated by the head. Shingled recording takes advantage of this condition by overlapping tracks when writing. Each consecutive track is overlapped with the previous track. This results in readable adjacent tracks of approximately half the width the write head can write, and they can be read fine. The trouble comes when you want to overwrite a block on track. If you write to the 1/2 width track with the write head, it will also overwrite an adjacent tracks data. too This is what makes them very different from CMR.

Device based SMR divides the disk into zones which they treat as a unit for writing. They also reserve disk space for a cache that gets directly written to from the hoist, then moved to a CMR zone when the drive is idle. Anyhow, there is no one to one mapping to the data like SSD, but it is quite different. I don't know much about the internals of this since I have never really used SMR drives and never will. They were created when there was a technology gap limiting the capacity of hard drives. But then helium filled drives that permitted platters to be closer together and hence more platters soon came into being. You can get very high capacity CMR drives now. The only thing SMR has going is they are slightly cheaper. It seems in the consumer space, the niche for SMR is in the low-end smaller capacity drives, just for cost savings.

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-shingled-magnetic-recording-hdd-technology.pdf

Cheers

My two cents

Despite advances in SMR most typical SMR drives on the domestic end user market tend not to last as long as CMR mechanical hard drives. That has been my personal experience and I am hardly new to replacing and repairing mechanical hard drives. Among the worst were the Seagate 500 GB (extra thin) hard drives and Western Digital Blue hard drives regardless of capacity. I often wondered why so many of my Seagate drives would out last Western Digital Blue drives and thought it must have something to do with how Seagate made them that rendered their drives superior to WD drives. It wasn't until much later when I learned the difference between SMR and CMR and sure enough, my Seagate hard drives were CMR. The Seagate hard drives that I replaced for others (including the 500GB ones I mentioned) were SMR as well. Meanwhile, ye olde Western Digital Blacks would be among those that outlasted the rest and I still have some Velociraptors that run fine that must be pushing close to 20 years of use by now.

Out of principle I refuse to purchase Western Digital mechanical drives even if they're CMR because of their poor customer service. I recall having to send a drive back (still under warranty) and disputing with the gentleman on the phone for a replacement who said, "okay, but just this once". Western Digital can thank him for making many new die hard Seagate customers for the next five years after that phone call. All the repairs and builds I did afterward in that time would include new Seagate hard drives if the PC came to me with a Western Digital Blue hard drive, and you can best believe I explained my reasons why to my clients. It was a while before I determined the real reason behind all these failed WD Blues is simply because they're SMR.

Admittedly, most CMR drives will cost slightly more. I'm old and spoiled now so I use helium filled mechanical hard drives which have lasted years without issue. I still have some Western Digital Blue hard drives. They sit in my cupboard in cold storage. They're clones. If I need an OS on a drive I just clone it on over to an SSD. It no longer makes sense to run an OS on a mechanical hard drive but for storage helium filled CMR mechanical drives work well. I find they also work well with LSI BROADCOM HBA cards so for those who are thinking about building themselves a home server and are looking at some fairly affordable RAID these might be worth obtaining. No, they're not lightning fast but they certainly do the job. IMO the less you have to use an SMR drive the better off you will be.

garlin · May 27, 2025

You should refuse to purchase WD HDD's because they're always bundling some lame Windows driver that breaks Core Isolation, or is flagged as an insecure driver... My two cents.

Scannerman · May 27, 2025

garlin said:
You should refuse to purchase WD HDD's because they're always bundling some lame Windows driver that breaks Core Isolation, or is flagged as an insecure driver... My two cents.

Indubitably there are manifest reasons NOT to purchase WD mechanical hard drives. Windows 11 might be one of them.

PerpetualCycle · May 27, 2025

garlin said:
You should refuse to purchase WD HDD's because they're always bundling some lame Windows driver that breaks Core Isolation, or is flagged as an insecure driver... My two cents.

??? There are no bundled drivers with any WDC HDD I've owned. They use the Windows drivers.

garlin · May 27, 2025

PerpetualCycle said:
??? There are no bundled drivers with any WDC HDD I've owned. They use the Windows drivers.

Not for the internal drives. The external USB models come with those drivers, you will see constant complaints on this or TenForums on how the driver's presence stops Windows feature upgrades from happening.

PerpetualCycle · May 27, 2025

garlin said:
Not for the internal drives. The external USB models come with those drivers, you will see constant complaints on this or TenForums on how the driver's presence stops Windows feature upgrades from happening.

I see. I never buy pre-built externals, always buy by uasp external enclosures and internal drives and assemble. They do not require drivers other than windows' and are superior.

spapakons · May 27, 2025

garlin said:
Not for the internal drives. The external USB models come with those drivers, you will see constant complaints on this or TenForums on how the driver's presence stops Windows feature upgrades from happening.

We can just avoid using the WD software in the drive, and let Windows use its own drivers.

MachineLanguage · May 27, 2025

Sheikh said:
I can't change this HDD as I mentioned it's not my own laptop.

No wories. At least you attempted to warn the "office computer guy/gal that it might be going bad." You did warn them didnt you?

garlin · May 27, 2025

spapakons said:
We can just avoid using the WD software in the drive, and let Windows use its own drivers.

Except when WU installs the stupid WDC SAM driver! lol
Microsoft Update Catalog

cheaterslick · May 27, 2025

I haven't used WD internal HDDs in years. All have been external and so far (knock on wood) they've held up. Mostly USB powered for storage.

Scannerman · May 28, 2025

garlin said:
Except when WU installs the stupid WDC SAM driver! lol
Microsoft Update Catalog

Remember Western Digital "My Book"? Tried that once. Never again.

Solved HDD click sounds

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