dh2005

Hello everyone,

Please excuse my dramatic tone, but I am completely at the end of my tether. I feel like I'm losing my mind over this.


The problem I have, essentially, is that I have three hard drives, all of the same make and model, behaving in the same manner. They never stop ticking. Not ever. They used to work in near-silence. But now, constant thrashing.

People on another forum tell me this is a sign of impending drive failure. But how the Hell could lightning strike in the same place three times? These drives are less than two months old. Surely, surely, surely all three of them wouldn't start dying at the same time...?!

It's nothing to do with Windows (I've already turned off indexing). These drives thrash whether they are connected to a Windows PC, or a Linux media player (Popcorn Hour C-200). Even when the device that they're connected to is switched-off, they just sit there, thrashing away. Nothing could possibly be accessing them, so who the f*** are they talking to...?!?!


I am losing faith in all things electrical. Please, any thoughts? I'm desperate.

Cheers.




DH.



EDIT: Illustration of how ridiculous this is - I've just put the drive into a powered USB caddy that's not connected to a computer of any kind. On turning on the caddy, within five seconds, it's thrashing.

Stupid.

Dogg

Sounds like some sort of drive failure. You could try testing the drives using the drive manufacturers disk tools.

dh2005

Thank you for the reply.


That's what others have said. But, seriously... all three of them, in two months? How is that possible? I mean, that's an absolutely catastrophic failure rate. How do these things ever get out of the door if they're going to die like this?

Dogg

My first thought would be the power supply. Low or dirty power can cause all sorts of issues and failures.

raptor_pa may have another idea or suggestion.

raptor_pa

I agree with Dogg on that, we haven't seen any of the green 1.5 drives thru for recovery yet. Could be a bad batch of drives, but something like this I tend to think of other causes. Maybe set the acoustic mode.

dh2005

I really appreciate the creative thinking, guys. I'm glad I posted here.

What do you think might be amiss with power supply? I mean, this drive is in a USB caddy connected to the mains with the power cable that it came with. It's not like I've swapped-in any sub-standard parts. And when it's inside my C-200 it's connected to an internal SATA connector.

You should hear this thing, man. I'm sitting two feet away from it in an otherwise silent room, and I can hardly hear myself think. The drive was never this noisy in normal function. It sounds like it's tearing itself apart.

dh2005

Can I please also ask what you meant by "set the acoustic mode"...?

dh2005

I just defragged another 1.5TB Green - one that was working perfectly - and now it's doing the same... I'm pretty sure that I defragged the others too, at some point.

Any thoughts on how/why the defragging process would cause this?


EDIT:

Also, while a 'thrashing' drive is being defragged, the thrashing stops.

I'm offering this detail in case it makes any sense to anybody...!

raptor_pa

Can you record the noise? Check in BIOS for an acoustic management setting.

dh2005

Not sure how I'd record it, dude. I don't really have any recording equipment.


So, acoustic management is accessed in the main BIOS? I take it that 'acoustic management' determines the volume generated by the drive... but before this crap started happening, I was entirely happy with the noise it made. So I wouldn't think that turning down the noise would be necessary.

Plus, would this thrashing not shorten the life of the drive? It certainly sounds like it's going thirteen-to-the-dozen...! I can hardly count the ticks, but it must be at least fifteen a second.

raptor_pa

Kind of hard to tell without hearing it, but some noise is normal, ticking is not. When you defragged did you use the stock windows defrag or a third party defrag that tries to move files to 'fast' parts of the disk?

dh2005

I usually do it through a DOS box. Ya know, like, "defrag f:"

Old habits....

dh2005

I don't know whether "ticking" misrepresents the sound... it sounds like regular writing noise, only louder, and constant.

dh2005

re post #8; I just defragged that drive again, and now the noise has stopped. I'm gonna try defragging the other problematic drives to see whether that shuts them up, too...

... but seriously. Why would defragging be the root of and/or solution to this problem? Doesn't make much sense to me.


EDIT:

Is there any reason why a drive would need so long to get its act together after a defrag? Particularly with indexing turned off. Why doesn't it just stop defragging, then settle immediately?


As a worst-case scenario type of thought... is there any way that running these drives in a USB caddy could somehow damage them? Not that they've been run very often, in the last two months.

dh2005

I need to hit the sack. I'm just gonna leave this thing ticking all night, and see whether it gets over it.


Thanks very much, both of you, for your help today.

dh2005

Nah. This other drive has been thrashing all night, and it's still doing the same.


Any other thoughts? Because at the moment, I'm considering completely excluding internal drives from my media project. If I can't trust them not to go flaky on me within nine weeks of buying them, they're no good to me.

grimx133

Externals are good for backing up and stuff, but shouldn't be connected all the time. Poor airflow in the enclosures leads to heat buildup. It seems we see a higher failure rate in the externals as opposed to internals. I had one that went south on me twice, so I pulled it out of the casing, but haven't stuck it in internally yet, kinda maxed on internals.

dh2005

Thanks to you, also.

I don't run these drives in external enclosures the whole time. I only really use put them into external enclosures to format them and copy data. Most of the time, they're being used as playback drives inside my C-200. Other than when they're being formatted, they're never really being used for any longer than three hours at a time.

I really don't do anything extreme to these drives. Whenever they're not being used they're stored in a cool, dry place inside anti-static cases. I really don't think I deserve this...!!!

dh2005

Given the expertise around here, can I please ask a general drive-maintenance question...?


Let's say you have an NTFS-formatted 1TB drive with 700GB of data on it, and you decide that you want to use the drive for something else. Will erasing all of the data be adequate, or should you reformat the drive first?

dh2005

I'm sorry if the above is a Douche-Bag 101 hard drive question, by the way...