Black WD1001FALS clicking sound

Hi, I have a brand new Black WD1001FALS drive running in a Windows 7 machine. The disk is a secondary drive. I've noticed that when the drive is idle it makes a short double click sound every 5-6 seconds.

I’ve seen a similar issue reported on the WD forum so I’ve tried the advice of removing the data cable and powering up the drive with just power, this stops the clicking, until the data cable is reattached. I tried four different SATA cables and the clicking remains, and different SATA ports on the motherboard. Also triple checked the bios settings.

This doesn’t sound normal to me, but maybe it is. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

some drives do quick smart tests (a lot of segates do it very anoying on the .9 drives as they was noisy the .10 and .11 drives you may not pick up on the sound)

my WD drive does not click when idle apart from then it powers down, it may be an program that is accessing the disk when idle, open performance > disk and check from there as it may show what program is doing it

Hi leexgx,

thanks for the advice, I've checked with the performance tool in win 7. All processes running on c: drive, no activity on the secondary d: drive (WD1001FALS).

I've also used HD tune program to monitor activity, but no activity reported while the clicking happens.

I have the same drive as you, and can confirm that it is not normal (and my case is very resonant), check what AAM you have set, use crystaldiskinfo in functions>advanced features>AAM/APM Control, it will also tell you the state of the drive too.

Thanks --ki--

I just tried the crystaldiskinfo tool, the the AAM/APM tool made the disk go quite only when set on the max silent, even the slightly away from silent and the click starts again. Does using full-silent mode mean giving up on some performance?

Yes the access time drops to something like 19ms from 12-13ms, not noticeable if its just a storage drive, but very noticeable if its your boot drive, think HDDs 2-3 years ago. But as said before this operation is not normal, as mine does not click at all.

thanks, I think I'll send it back as it's only 2 weeks old and I can live without it for a few weeks.

Thanks for the advice.

yh good thinking you dont want a data screw up.

http://www.datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

That website has got a load of sound clips of noises that HDD's make when they are failing, it might be worth having a listen to see if it sounds like anything described on there.

Thanks Davyboy,

The click sounded a little like the laptop sound file, but can't be sure.

I purchased it from Overclockers so it is best/quicker to return to them or go direct to Western Digital?

Thanks to everyone for the advice.