Thread: Why is there a clicking sound coming from my hard drve?

Originally Posted by Subhuman15

Hope you've been good about making back up's

I'm a big fan of mozy (on-line backup), but was wondering, for those who aren't ever going to be good about backups -- since hard drives are high-speed mechanical devices, and so much more prone to failure -- is there anything wrong with just keeping user-created files on Flash USB sticks (no moving parts = much lower failure rates)? I know accessing such files is probably slower, and they have finite write cycles to their sectors (which some software will warn us about as end-of-life is approached?), but is there anything else that makes such a scheme a poor choice?

Clicking of the drive means as mentioned already is the drive is going bad if not already.

Disk Warrior may help but it is a long shot. I have done this once but would not recommend it I have pulled a clicking drive out of the computer and slammed it on a very sturdy table and amazingly the drive worked for a couple more years but I didn't have any important data on it so for me there was a no loss situation.

Here is something that you may want to look at in the future is setting up a RAID1 using 2 equal drives which will allow you to lose a single drive but not lose any data. Can be done in Mac OS fairly simple and will protect your data in the future. and if one fails all you need to do is replace it and rebuild the RAID array and you are back to normal.

Originally Posted by beingbobbyorr

I'm a big fan of mozy (on-line backup), but was wondering, for those who aren't ever going to be good about backups -- since hard drives are high-speed mechanical devices, and so much more prone to failure -- is there anything wrong with just keeping user-created files on Flash USB sticks (no moving parts = much lower failure rates)? I know accessing such files is probably slower, and they have finite write cycles to their sectors (which some software will warn us about as end-of-life is approached?), but is there anything else that makes such a scheme a poor choice?

Also you probably don't want to keep important data on a USB flash drive or at least consider it a reliable backup only because USB flash drive do have a read write lifespan of 100,000 transactions and that is not just 100,000 writes to the drive or reads of the drive every time you access the data, even just looking at it, is a transaction to the drive.

The only downside to an On line backup is if you have lets say 70 GB of Video files it will take about a week or 2 to upload that data and really not recommended for backing up Video's that are being edited as when you edit the video the whole file needs to be copied not just the changes like it does with the other types of files.

Online backup is really good for backing up important data files but not the files that D28 mentioned he has on the drive. What he needs is an external drive for backing up to much like a G-RAID drive.

Originally Posted by rbochan

The "click of death" is a sign of just that - imminent drive death.

it's not a sign of "imminent" death - it's THE sign of death. That noise is the sound of the heads physically crashing into the platters. It is done. Expensive 3rd party recovery centers such as OnTrack can't even recover data when this happens because the platters are physically damaged.

Originally Posted by RoyalPain

The only downside to an On line backup is if you have lets say 70 GB of Video files it will take about a week or 2 to upload that data and really not recommended for backing up Video's that are being edited as when you edit the video the whole file needs to be copied not just the changes like it does with the other types of files.

Online backup is really good for backing up important data files but not the files that D28 mentioned he has on the drive. What he needs is an external drive for backing up to much like a G-RAID drive.

Well, yes and no. Online backups are great, but the first backup takes FOREVER. If you use an incremental backup, the second and third backups won't take nearly as long. That 70GB of videos will suck the first time, but how much data do most home users change so that their online backups will take more than a few hours?

The best backup option is to keep on-site backups for daily/weekly, and just use an incremental online backups for weekly/monthly backups.

Originally Posted by Creeping Death

Well, yes and no. Online backups are great, but the first backup takes FOREVER. If you use an incremental backup, the second and third backups won't take nearly as long. That 70GB of videos will suck the first time, but how much data do most home users change so that their online backups will take more than a few hours?

The best backup option is to keep on-site backups for daily/weekly, and just use an incremental online backups for weekly/monthly backups.

Exactly it all depends on the situation. For archiving video yes it is fine to do. But in this case it wouldn't be the best choice.

I had the same symptoms with drives at my work. What kind of drive is it? LaCie and Western Digital are famous for that type of thing... clicking sounds, not mounting and then the drive is shot with no chance of recovery.
Do you have power surges or failures where the drives are
connected? That might an issue to deal with in the future should you
buy a new drive(s).