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[Diablos]

Lately this 80gb maxtor I bought has been clicking a LOT louder and harder. I've read other maxtor horror stories and that seems like that's how their problems started too. This surprises me, I own a 40gb Maxtor drive, have had it for 4+ years, works great. I have a 120gb Maxtor drive, have had it for 1+ year, works great.

Is there a utility that I can use that can determine if there's a physical problem with the hard drive?

 

[Brannon]

Start backing up your stuff to CD-R NOW.

A progressively louder clicking hard drive is nothing to procrastinate about. My hard drive had the sense to tell me it was about to go out when I booted up one day, so I ghosted it up and a week later, complete hard drive failure.

Back up now.

 

[Wario64]

What Brannon said. Back that shit up now

 

[Diablos]

Meh, its just my parents box. I guess I can back stuff up onto a DVD+R. I don't even know if there's 4.7gb of data to back up. The weird thing is, it only started doing this after I installed SP2. WTF

One other funny thing is that SiSoft Sandra reports that the drive is too fragmented to do a drive speed index test, even though I JUST defragmented it.

 

[Brannon]

Aaaaannnnd that would be warning number 2...

 

[Trevelyon]

I booted up the PC this morning and I couldn't access my F drive (Maxtor 120 gig) for like 4 minutes, just loud clicking noises like it was really struggling, after a while it calmed down.. but the hdd has progressively gotten louder over the last few months.

I've backed up about half of my stuff onto DVD-R's but still I've still got a lot of stuff I don't wanna lose.

 

[Diablos]

It's been doing this for a while now, I'd say three or four weeks... how much longer do you think I have? I don't really care, it's under an extended warranty. I'll just get a new one and I have a spare for in between. Ever since I installed SP2 it started clicking louder. Weird...

 

[Deleted member 1235]

describe the clicking sound.

If it sounds remotely like a marble bouncing on something hard it's fucked.

 

[Wario64]

It's been doing this for a while now, I'd say three or four weeks... how much longer do you think I have? I don't really care, it's under an extended warranty. I'll just get a new one and I have a spare for in between. Ever since I installed SP2 it started clicking louder. Weird...

My other hard drive has had this clicking noise for months, since like January, I shit you not. Yes, I'm that crazy to be using the HD for that long, but I had my stuff backed up so I didn't really care. It can stay alive for a good time but who knows. I just switched hard drives though and I'm using the old one for my PS2 HDloader until it dies

 

[Diablos]

WTF. Amset had the drive set on "performance" or FAST. I didn't turn that on. I turned it back to off and now it sounds like it's ok. It did get louder during SP2 setup; I wonder if it can change a drive's acoustic management settings during setup for what it thinks would "help best for better performance" or something dumb like that?

No it doesn't sound like a marble hitting it. It was just really loud clicking.

Sandra still doesn't work but all other benchmarks do (for my HD).

 

[Diablos]

Of course... it still clicks kind of weird. Oh well. What can you do besides backup? Nothing but RMA when it finally breaks