Hey guys, I recently bought two of the above mentioned drives. I installed both at the same time and booted my computer up into vista. I went into the disk management and enabled the two drives, one of them began making a clicking sound. Before formatting them to ntfs I exited the disk management to see if it would stop the clicking sound, it didn't, it continually kept clicking until I powered down. Once I rebooted there was no longer any noise, did a quick format one the drives and everything appears fine. I has been almost 2 days now and the clicking has not come back. I still fear that the drive may be doomed so i'd like to figure out WHICH one of the 2 was making the noise so i could RMA it.

Can anyone give me some advice on how I can go about finding the problematic drive? Is the clicking that happened for a few minutes even an issue since it hasn't shown up again?

I downloaded and ran the low level format tool from the website here and started to do one drive, i'm not sure if it is a problem with the drive but even now while it's formatting it is continually displaying on the screen "Format error occured at offset xxxxxxx" and it just keeps going on and on giving that same error.

So does anyone have any advice on what I should do to find the defective drive? Should i run the WD diagnostics and look for errors? Maybe some other program that is offered here? Any help would be appreciated, I don't want to fill the drive up with data only to have it die in a month.

Thanks.

There is a free tool for this kind of analysis : your ears.

Clicking is clearly audible, so it would be easy to point out which one is failing : re-apply the condition that made it click (i.e. format) then just listen.

What else ? If it is intermittent, it will be difficult. But this situation is a time bomb. Maybe analysing the SMART status logs on each drive can give some more hints.

I realize that I can use my ears, but my ears won't do any good if i can't get it to click again. Like I mentioned it clicked the one time only two days ago when I initialized the drive in windows disk management. It has not done anything since, and I have tried doing similar things to get it to click again. That is the reason I was wondering if there was a program that MAY tell me if one of my drives has some sort of problem.

Download MHDD and run the scan on each drive. If a drive fails, RMA it. If your data is important to you, make sure it is backed up...even if you had drives you trust.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

as he said. MHDD will damage your data. please pay attention.

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data recovery service[/b]

who is not paying attention here?

What options should I turn "on" when I run the scan? I ran the scan with whatever settings were preselected and it didn't do anything? One drive just showed a bunch of numbers next to the <3, <5 and <10 msec rows, and the other drive once I returned home from work had scanned but for some reason defaulted back to the main menu when completed so I never got to see the results.