3½" PATA Western Digital Caviar SE (250MB) makes steady ticking sound when idle

Posted by intuited on Super User See other posts from Super User or by intuited
Published on 2010-12-28T05:14:42Z Indexed on 2010/12/28 5:56 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 406

Filed under:

hard-drive

|

western-digital

I've started to notice a ticking sound emanating from my WD2500JB. It is not alarmingly loud. The sound seems to occur only when the drive has been idle for some time, and will cease upon (some?) disk activity. The sound has a regular, steady cadence of somewhere between about 4 and 6 ticks per second.

I'm not entirely certain that it just started making these sounds, since I previously had the drive — mounted in a USB enclosure — stored out of earshot, and only recently moved it to where I can hear it.

The SMART attributes for the drive do not indicate any problems.

I did have some errors to clean up recently (since I started noticing the sounds). The errors occurred on an ext3 filesystem. The drive had been powered down while mounted a few times prior to that fsck.

Is this cause for alarm? Should I scrap the drive on principle?

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about hard-drive

Move smaller hard drive to partition on a larger hard drive

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu. I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about… >>> More
Copy the contents of one hard drive partition to anohter hard drive partition

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have made a C++ program which can copy the whole hardrive partition to another hardrive partition, but now I am looking forward for the program which can only copy the contents of one hardrive partiton to another hardrive partition. >>> More
Using an ATA-100 Hard Drive with a Thermaltake BlacX External Hard Drive Dock

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Is it possible for a Thermaltake BlacX HDD Dock to connect to and recognize an ATA-100 Hard Drive? I know that the specifications for the BlacX say that it only supports SATA & SATAII, but I was hoping for one of three things: 1) for it to still work even though it isn't supported 2) for there… >>> More
backup hard drive image on external hard drive for Windows 7

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hello, I am looking for a backup tool for Windows 7, that will allow me to backup my laptop’s hard drive on an external hard drive as an exact image. In a case of a problem with the main hard drive, I would like just to swap the drives and to continue to work using the backup hard drive. Thanks >>> More
Copy the contents of one hard drive partition to anohter hard drive partition

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have made a C++ program which can copy the whole hardrive partition to another hardrive partition, but now I am looking forward for the program which can only copy the contents of one hardrive partiton to another hardrive partition. >>> More

Related posts about western-digital

Access Western Digital My Book World II RAID array on my Ubuntu Linux

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hi, My WD My Book World II (Blue Rings) NAS has overheated, I think the motherboard is dead. I extracted the disks and plugged them in my desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. The disks seems to be alive, they are spinning and the BIOS recognize them but Ubuntu is not able to boot as soon as these drives… >>> More
Raid-1 Western Digital Green AARS, cloning and WD Align Utility

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hello all, My current setup runs on top of 2x Western Digital 2500KS drives on Raid-1, using the motherboard's 780G raid controller, on WinXP. Everything is fine, but the drives are a bit noisy. I am considering buying 2x WD6400AARS disks which are the 640GB slower 'green' drives, but also feature… >>> More
Western Digital My Book World drops off network

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Most of my storage in my house relies on a WD My Book World Edition 500GB network drive. I threw out the vendor crapware they give you to access it (a trial version of Mionet) after it starting nagging me to upgrade, and set it up as a standard network drive using Window's Map Network Drive. However… >>> More
Western Digital not recognized by Windows after power Outage on windows

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have WD Essential Plus 1.5TB (formatted in NTFS). It was working fine under windows and mac mini. While it was connected to the mac mini, I had an power outage and now the HD is not being recognized under windows anymore. Now on the mac mini the HD is fine and I can see my data. When I use ActiveBootDisk… >>> More
Western Digital Smartware not detect External HDD

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hi people, i recently buy WD Mybook Essential HDD 1 TB. I downloaded and install Smartware software in both my desktop (windows xp) and laptop (Windows 7) but in both case the s/w is not able to detect the external hard disc. It shows desktop/laptop (Whichever is apt) on left hand side of software… >>> More