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Which hard drive is clicking?!

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I noticed today when writing some large files to my unRaid box that one of the drives would periodically click click click. Well, that can't be good! Any ideas on how to find which one it is?

You could try writing directly to drive shares and see which makes the noise or if your writing a file to user share go look on your drives and see where it was written to.

Start by looking a the SMART reports by clicking on each disk  (Disk 1, etc.) on the 'Main. Tab, then click on the 'Attributes', 'Capabilities'  and 'Identity' tabs.  Ideally, attributes # 5, 196, 197 and 198 should be zero. 

 

Another thing to consider is that a drive has be spun up to 'click', so you could try spinning down each drive one at a time to see if you can isolate the clicking one that way.  (Or spin all of the drives down and see if spinning them up one at time will identify it.)

...it's the one that says "Seagate" on the side  :P

 

sorry, couldn't help myself.

...it's the one that says "Seagate" on the side  :P

 

sorry, couldn't help myself.

 

Or IOmega!  (Remember their Zip Drives???)

I noticed today when writing some large files to my unRaid box that one of the drives would periodically click click click. Well, that can't be good! Any ideas on how to find which one it is?

 

Depending on which click, it may or may not be a warning signal. The SMART report may help identify a drive reporting errors. Attribute 7,8, and 11 are useful to identify seek (head positioning) problems.

 

Since you know it was during the write of a large file, using the disk shares you can find which drive got the large file written.

...it's the one that says "Seagate" on the side  :P

 

sorry, couldn't help myself.

 

Or IOmega!  (Remember their Zip Drives???)

 

I try not to, but 100 megs was massive....  ;D

...it's the one that says "Seagate" on the side  :P

 

sorry, couldn't help myself.

 

Or IOmega!  (Remember their Zip Drives???)

 

I try not to, but 100 megs was massive....  ;D

 

The 250MB ones were even better.  You could lose 2.5 times more data in one go.  :P

...it's the one that says "Seagate" on the side  :P

 

sorry, couldn't help myself.

 

Or IOmega!  (Remember their Zip Drives???)

 

I try not to, but 100 megs was massive....  ;D

 

The 250MB ones were even better.  You could lose 2.5 times more data in one go.  :P

 

Hehe, my Dad's work used them for backups as well...  ;D

...it's the one that says "Seagate" on the side  :P

 

sorry, couldn't help myself.

 

Or IOmega!  (Remember their Zip Drives???)

 

I try not to, but 100 megs was massive....  ;D

 

The 250MB ones were even better.  You could lose 2.5 times more data in one go.  :P

 

Hehe, my Dad's work used them for backups as well...  ;D

 

Now that I think about it, I am almost positive, that I still have one down in a box of junk that I saved from an old computer that my ex son-in-law was getting rid of. It was probably one of the ones that plugged into the parallel printer port... 

 

Oh, by the way, dkerlee, have you figured which drive is giving you the problem yet?

 

  • Author

Well it is a funny digression. Sadly, I had to pull the iomega zip drive storage pool a while back. It was full of my archived .txt files.

 

I spun down all the discs, and spun them up one at a time: no clicking. I did a SMART report on each drive. Got some interesting results on:

disk5 Seagate 2TB 5y 9m spun up

disk8 Wester Digital 1.5TB 4y 9m spun up

disk10 Seagate 3TB 0y 6m

 

 

disk5

5p1ah9u.png

 

disk8

SrWnAXt.png

 

disk10

TyU5lKm.png

 

For the meaning of the various SMART attributes see here:

 

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes

 

The disk I (personally)  would be worried is disk 8  It has reallocated sectors and UDMA CRC errors.  I know that the CRC errors are hardware errors external to the hard drive that are caused by (in most cases) bad SATA data cable connections (loose or corroded) or cross-talk between cables.  Cross talk is usually caused by bundling unshielded SATA data cables.  (98% of all SATA cables are unshielded!) This is usually done to make the inside of the case look neat.  Bundling cables often contributes to loose connections between the cable and its socket.  (The SATA cable design is NOT very really very secure under the best conditions!)  Reallocated Sectors are not necessary a problem but if they are increasing over time, they can indicate a failing drive. 

 

By the way, notice that attribute # 188 on disk 10 is actually 5  5  6.  The space between the numbers is easily missed.  (My Seagate 3TG values are 0  0  0 for  my drives.)    I am not really sure what the significance of your non-zero values is.

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