Noise from Western Digital WD5000BEVT

[TMessenger]

Hi,

After a recent HDD failure, I purchased the 500GB Western Digital WD5000BEVT internal 2.5 SATA HDD for a Dell Inspiron 1750 laptop. The drive appears to be working fine, but there seems to be an intermitent noise coming from it: like a quiet, but noticeable, click. I've run chkdsk a couple of times, used WD's hardware diagnostics, defrag'ed the drive and scanned for viruses, and everything suggests the disk is working fine. However, the light clicking noise is still present. The sound is similar to the noise when the disc spins up. I've noticed it seems to get more persistent when the laptop has been in use for a while, such as at the end of the day.

When my last internal drive failed I was alerted to the impending disaster by a loud clicking noise which is associated with HDD failures. I know this noise and the one my current HDD is making isn't the same! Am I just been paranoid about my drive failing again, or is my HDD actually failing already?

Thanks for any help.

[Vulcan]

The drive appears to be working fine, but there seems to be an intermitent noise coming from it: like a quiet, but noticeable, click.

This could be the heads unloading & loading, but that's only a guess.

There are reports of "over enthusiastic" power-saving settings inc head unloading on some WD disks. I would start by collecting all the raw SMART attribute values (my favourite tool is smartctl, but HDDScan from this website has a nice GUI and will also do the job - the choice ot tool is up to you); wait a few mins (to allow the clicking to happen for a short while), then collect the SMART attribute values again and compare the two sets. If the head unload count has incremented significantly, that's likely what's causing the clicking. Then suitable remediation (e.g. use of the WD idle utility (even though it's only listed for use with a limited subset of WD disks)), could be investigated.

[PrinceOfAbyss]

I'm not a pro, I'm just replying to your message as an ex-owner of the same disk for almost a year. It was doing the exact same faint clicking that you describe during that year. I was worried very much at first, but then I concluded it's just normal noise the particular disk produces and got used to it.

But the disk lasted only a year... I'm not sure if the particular disk is just a rushed product or poor design of WD, I only know it cost me 800USD to recover the data I had in it...

So, whether the clicks are a sign of future fault, or just normal, you better backup your critical data regularly.