Hard drive noises

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Giles Orr wrote:

> 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

Over the last few months I've purchased several 2TB drives that I use in 
external enclosures (accessing them via eSATA or USB).  Each one exhibited 
an occassional (but irregular) tick sound that worried me at first.  The 
drives always seemed to be idle when I heard this.

I've since concluded this is part of the 'green' capabilities of the 
drives.  I think the tick is the sound of the head being parked or 
something else to do with it being shutdown.

> 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?

I don't think an under-voltage could damage the drive but it might be able 
to damage the data on the drive.  I don't claim to be an electrical 
engineer though :)

> Any alternate theories?  Or am I just paranoid?  Thanks!

A little paranoia can be a good thing :)

Remember: Backup any data that you care about.

In my cases the drives in question are _for_ backups.  The death of a 
single backup drive won't hurt me too much even if it occured at the same 
time that a system died.  The death of multiple backup drives 
simultaneously would be concerning.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
Email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org		Linux counter ID #16440
IRC: Solver (OFTC & Freenode)
Web: http://www.practicalsysadmin.com
Contributing member of Software in the Public Interest (http://spi-inc.org/)
Open Source: The revolution that silently changed the world
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists