On 10/03/2015 05:32 AM, Mick wrote: > On Saturday 03 Oct 2015 12:23:47 Dale wrote: >> Mick wrote: >>> Hi All, >>> >>> Recently I noticed that an old drive is clicking 3 or 4 times when it is >>> powered up. Thereafter is stays quiet. I think it is a mechanical >>> fault, because I placed the box on its side and the drive did not click >>> when booting up. >>> >>> I ran smartctl short/long/conveyance tests and no errors are reported. >>> >>> In your experience is this something to concern myself with? There is >>> not business critical data on the drive at present.
Some drives click from new, Toshiba laptop drives come to mind. However, this Toshiba drive would only click when powered up. We are still using this particular drive, and the laptop is 5-6 years old now. We tried RMA'ing that drive and it came back no fault found, with a note that it may click occasionally. (Design defect? Who knows...) >> >> I have found that if SMART reports a error, it is good to replace it as >> soon as you can. When a drive makes a noise that isn't normal, that's >> also a sign that you need to replace it. If you google around for that >> model of drive, you may can find where others have had the same and they >> shed some light on what happened, it died, it ran for ages and is normal >> or something else. I agree, check SMART regularly. Even in a crontab (use cronie if you power off a lot so it will run if missed.) You can also set up email monitoring so it will email when tests run. >> >> Right now, backups would be a good idea. Doing some drive shopping >> would to unless google turns up something that says it is nothing to >> worry about, doubtful tho. I have lost hard drives before and learned my lesson. My data is in three different places, one being offline. > > I don't know if I am getting more nostalgic in my old days, but it is things > like this that make me like spinning drives. More often than not they give > some kind of warning. :-) I hate SSDs for this. I've had two outright fail with no warning. When they failed even SMART reported no errors! But it was obvious the drives weren't writing the data properly. > > That said I've not yet had an SSD going sideways on me. > You are lucky. I had one fail in my laptop, and one in my main mythtv frontend. Two different brands too. :-( Dan
