Hard drive noises

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 10:40:10AM -0500, Giles Orr wrote:
> I have an old laptop (very old! 550MHz Celeron) that functions as my
> alarm clock.  I'd use one of the Atom "nettops," but why bother while
> this thing still works?  And that's the question of the day, is it
> still working ...
> 
> The 20(?)GB HD in it died a couple months ago with a horrible death
> rattle - although as I think I mentioned, a freezer pack did wonders
> for getting the data off before it went into complete rigor mortis.  I
> replaced that drive with a 40GB HD I had lying around.  It made
> interesting ticking noises every sixty seconds or so - sort of a fast
> double-tick-slash-clunk noise.  Not loud, but definitely mildly
> worrisome.  And it did that for a month and a half until I replaced it
> with a brand new 320GB drive.  Where this all gets interesting to me
> is when I hooked up the new drive to my desktop with an external USB
> adapter that evidently didn't supply enough power: the new drive made
> a series of horrible clonking noises until I unplugged it.  I added
> external power and suddenly the drive was fine.  Transferred the data
> I needed, stuffed the drive into the old laptop.
> 
> The new drive "ticks" every once in a while, pretty regularly.  Very
> quietly, but not when there's any apparent drive activity.  So I've
> come up with a theory that the laptop power supply is producing a very
> slight under-voltage that could, perhaps, be damaging the drives over
> time.  So is this possible?  Likely?  And is there any way to check?
> Any alternate theories?  Or am I just paranoid?  Thanks!

I think some hard drives do head alignment checks regularly to deal with
temperature changes and such.  Could also just be parking the head when
not busy to be safe.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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