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Posted by Ouch on April 8, 2008, 2:46 am
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>
>>The other day, I bought an external 500 gig Seagate Free Agent drive. It
>>made a few clicking noises when writing data, so after some research on
>>internet, I decided I would return it. So I purchased from another store a
>>750 gig Seagate FreeAgent drive. Now this drive does exactly the same
>>thing,
>>so I'm most reluctant to return this one because I know that Seagate is a
>>very good brand and that all hard drives have to make some operating
>>noises.
>>A year ago, a friend bought a 500 gig Seagate Free Agent drive, and it
>>makes
>>no clicking noises at all when you write to it, so that's why I thought
>>something might be wrong with mine.
>>
>>The Seagate drives come with a 5-year limited warranty, so you can't do
>>much
>>better than that. I am using the drive mainly for backing up home movie
>>holiday captures, so it won't be in continuous daily use like some drives
>>are. Has anyone else experienced clicking noises on external hard drives?
>>Do
>>such noises really indicate that something is wrong, or is the hard drive
>>likely to operate satisfactorily for many years even with these
>>intermittent
>>clicking noises? Is there any software that I can run that will check out
>>whether there is anything wrong with the drive? I have the feeling that
>>there's not much point in swapping the drive again as all of them are
>>likely
>>to do the same! Thanks for your help.
>>
>>
>>
> Not on external drives (I have several, two FreeAgent Pro drives on
> DVRs and several smaller drives used intermittantly for computer
> backups), but I have had a few internal drives develop clicking
> noises. In every case, I eventually had problems with losing data on
> those drives.
>
> Incidentally, the two FreeAgent Pro drives (750 GB each) run 24-7, but
> I've only had one for about a month and the other less than a week....
> so there's not much experience to go on there. Still, since there is
> NO clicking noise, if I were you I'd contact Seagate and ask them....
> either for a replacement, or and explanation.
>
> In my case, a replacement after a year or even a month means I lose
> all recorded programs.... not a good deal at all!
>
> --
> Charlie Hoffpauir
> http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/
Thanks for your replies. Yes, I agree Charlie, I will try to get an
assurance from the manufacturer that all is well, despite the intermittent
clicking noises. I think it's important to have another copy of all
important data, so I'll do the second copies on dual layer DVDs. I think
that, even when hard drives fail, there's a fairly good chance of recovering
the data, but despite the cost, a second copy of the data is important.
I found one explanation about clicking noises on hard drives here:
http://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080303204940AAtSAPc
It says here that this problem occurs when the rocker arm that reads all the
information on the disk gets stuck. Apparently there is no real solution for
this, so the hard drive will eventually fail. Is this a reasonable
explanation?
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