hard drive noises -- western digital wd800ve

[Dan Ponte]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 10:33:32AM -0400, Michael Roberts <tpen0010 at hotmail.com> was witnessed plotting the following conspiracy:
> hi,
> 
> i'm encountering something funny in a hard drive i just installed.  issue 
> is: the hard drive makes clicking noises sometimes when the system is 
> trying to access the drive, and when that happens, there is a momentary 
> (half or quarter second) pause in whatever the computer was trying to do.  
> e.g., if i type in a partial path in a terminal, then try to tab-complete 
> it, i hear a little tic-toc, accompanied by a pause, before the completed 
> path shows up in the terminal.
> 
> the tic-toc noise is a little melodic (kinda like vibes) if that matters... 
> which it probably doesn't...
> 
> my info:
> 
> drive: western digital wd800ve.  i think this is an eide drive.
> running 7.0-current on a dell inspiron 8600 laptop.  previously running 
> 5.4-stable, and upgraded to see if it would fix the problem, which it 
> didn't.
> 
> this tic/toc noise only occurs occasionally when i run windows on the other 
> partition of the drive.  it causes the same delay there, but like i said it 
> only occurs once in a blue moon on the windows side, and is therefore 
> tolerable.  on the freebsd side, it happens all the time.
> 
> anyone know what i should do?  any and all help would be appreciated.
> 
> thanks!

I'd like to chime in here as well. I have a drive that does the exact
same thing, although it is a few years old (a WD200 20GB).
Smartmontools, however, reports nothing out of the ordinary. And the
clicks don't happen as often. They usually only do happen, however,
under heavy disk IO (such as during the daily runs). I really should get
the drive out of there and purchase another, but I'm a tad strapped for
cash as it is. I've seen this happen with quite a few other WD drives,
as well, though haven't observed in detail to the extent that I do now.
-Dan
-- 
Dan Ponte
http://www.theamigan.net/
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