Hi, I have a freecom enclosure with a Samsung 400LD drive inside, last week it started clicking and every time I tried to connect it again via usb, windows asked me to format it before I could use it.
I opened the enclosure up and connected it to my desktop where I saw it became a RAW drive and continued to click randomly, I managed to recover the data on their using a recovery data program.

Thereafter I wiped the drive with killdisk and formatted it, during this process the drive did not click once and I've copied data to the drive which did not cause the hard drive to click.

Thereafter I put the drive back into the enclosure but my laptop and desktop would not pick it up correctly and stated the usb device has malfunctioned, so again I remove it from the enclosure and connect it back to the desktop where it works fine.

I used HD Tune to scan for bad sectors but it didn't find any.

I'm not bothered about repairing the drive as I've recovered my data but is there any reason why the clicking has stopped once I wiped it and works fine as a internal drive but not externally?

Thanks.

Faulty enclosure or enclosure PSU, perhaps?

May be, I'll have to find another ide drive to put in the enclosure and try.

Any thoughts on the clicking?

Alternatively put that drive into another enclosure, or attach it via one of the external USB-IDE adapters (might be cheaper than an enclosure for this test, but obviously gives no physical protection, and be careful to connect the Molex power connector the correct way round, as some adapters can be forced in the wrong way round).

FYI, using a different drive in the "suspect" enclosure might be successful (e.g. if that drive has different power requirements), even if there is an enclosure / enclosure PSU fault, and so that result could mislead you.


Based on your description, and that the clicking stopped after you wiped the drive outside the enclosure, that specific clicking may have been part of the read retries by the drive, when trying to read sectors badly written due to the enclosure / enclosure PSU problem.

Since the clicking is no longer happening, following the drive being wiped, there is currently no problem to investigate. Therefore you're asking for a guess based on what you did to fix it - see what I mean? So that's my guess

I feel astonished how many time and efforts are used to "reanimate"
a most probably defect USB case / electronic.... even with the risk
to kill any hdd connected to it.

Such a case costs about 10,- to 20,- - thats definitely less than a
new hdd....

Wouldnt try anything with the old case but put it into the next
garbage.

+++

I don't really need the enclosure but I wanted to just see what was causing the malfunctioning, the hdd or enclosure.

The drive was wiped and formatted internally but I guess your right regarding there isn't a problem to investigate, I might just transfer a lot of data internally to fill up the hdd and see if it plays up.

Good point.


I'm glad you agree with my earlier comment that this is the likely problem

I forgot to check the health tab in hd tune previously, I've just checked it and it says the Reallocated Sector count data is 3726 but I've done another error scan and not a single sector is bad.

Windows is asking me to backup the drive as it has detected a hard disk problem, I'm guessing because of the SMART data.

I'm not at all surprised. The result of power problems can cause many different consequences in the SMART data, due to the bad effects on the drive


Yes, that's the likely cause, and is obviously bad news if the drive has used so many (or all) of its spare sectors for a spurious (likely power-related) reason.

If you want to post the info shown in the SMART tab of HD Tune, we can see the details there.

From this info you've given, you could consider asking if a DR company can clear the G-list on the drive (or whatever Samsung call their equivalent, if different) and reset its SMART data, but there is a risk that the drive really has been damaged by recent events, as falther mentioned.

Hi, Guess it won't be worth it cost wise, may just throw it away.

Thanks for all your help.