Idle Clicking: Normal or Not?

[eggbert74]

Hi,

I just got an acer laptop that has a WD2500BEVT Drive in it.  When the drive is idle, it clicks every few seconds. Sounds like the head parking noise, or like a very faint  camera shutter.  If the drive is busy, it's silent and there is no cicking.

I've run wd data lifegard diagnostics, and the SMART data checks out ok, and otherwise the drive seems fine... but the clicking is very annoying and worrisome. 

Now, I've read a lot of reports of people having a smiliar issue with drives doing this.   Some people claim to have this problem, some say their drives are completely silent.   I would like to know what the noise is. Is the drive defective?  If it is the heads parking every few seconds, isn't this a lot of wear and tear on the drive?

[fzabkar]

Try a more comprehensive SMART diagnostic tool. Examine the Load / Unload Cycle Count and Power On Hours.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

[eggbert74]

I tried HD sentinel. When I click on load/unload cycle count the value that shows up in the bottom pain says 3641.

Power on hours says 25.

Am I reading that right? Has the drive loaded and unloaded 3641 times?? I've only had the computer 3 days...

[fzabkar]

Yes, that's 1 load / unload cycle every 25 seconds. :-(

See this thread:
http://208.74.204.134/t5/IdeaPad-Y-U-B-and-Z-series/A-way-to-reduce-hdd-clicking-noise-solution/td-p...

[eggbert74]

Interesting. Clearly the drive must be faulty then?  Otherwise what would be the point of such excessive loads/unloads?

[fzabkar]

ISTM that the drive is going to sleep after a programmed period of idle time, and is then being woken up by an application, or an OS process. Are you using Linux?

[eggbert74]

I am running win7. However, I plan to install Linux. I put in an Ubuntu live CD and mounted the drive, no clicks at all.  Although, the OS wasn't running off the HD, it was just mounted.  Hopefully it won't click like this under Linux.

I also returned the computer today and exchanged it for another one, just in case the drive was bad... Guess what... This one does exactly the same thing as well. 

It seems amazing to me that WD would make laptop drives click them selves to death like this.  As I understand it, most drives are rated around 500000 load cycles. Mine was 3 days old and already pushing 4000 load cycles!  

Would love to hear from someone at WD explain this all.  Surely there must be some reasoning for this.