clicking hard drive

my 200gig maxtor hard drive is clicking and stoping for some reason. at first i thought it was heat but i clean the fans i actually bought 2 more to make sure im hoping they dont cause any problems they shouldnt. but i put one facing them and theres space inbetween them theres one sucking air out and another blowing air into the cpu and on the graphic card. anyway im using an 80maxtor now just so i dont have anymore problems. i figured using it for games was a bad thing so im storing games on the 80 and files and such on the 200 can someone help me is it heat or is it just overused

 

I had the same problem with a 40G Maxtor. I think it was heat related because it only happened when gaming where there was a lot of hard drive useage it would click and would not work again until the computer cooled. If you treid to reboot after the drive clicked and the computer locked up the computer could not find the drive after cooling off the drive showed back up.

 

If the drive is making 'cha-clunk' kind of sound; then that is a drive head bouncing of a disk platter. If this is the case the drive is definitely bad, it is a mechanical problem and is not fixable; well, at least a cost effective solution is not available.

 

yeah i let it cool down and it worked for a while it maybe because its overheated . but now im using a 80gig for the games and just that for storage i havent really touched it yet but im going to try and store some backups on it i hope it hasnt had a mechanical failure that would suck. i got it on sale but still. id hate to loose it

is there any way to check and see if its just overheating or use or just a mechanical problem. i need a somewhat cheap solution i dont feel like throwing money at this one.

 

You can try using the drive, and see how it performs. If a drive head has gone bad, the only time you will hear it bouncing of the disk platter, is when information is being read or written to the cylinder and track that drive head controls. Eventually the drive will fail completely, that could be tomorrow or 3 years from now.

 

If your harddrive has a temp sensor built in speedfan,available in the download section here at MG,will give you its temperature and tell you how healthy the drive is at the moment

Download and run the program,from the main menu click the S.M.A.R.T TAB then select the harddrive.

 

I use a cool program called Active Smart, it uses the drives SMART information to give you a masive list of all the ins and outs of any SMART HD (mine is also a 80Gb Maxtor) it reports the Temp, Read hits, spin up time etc.. errors, and Threshold properties of each factor, a very good early warning system of a failing hard drive, it will even give you the oportuninty to alarm if any threshold is exceeded. i think the program is shareware, but i paid the small fee to unlock it as its a usefull tool (to me anyway). my drive used to "click" which sounded like the head was stuck and then being pulled off something like a "flicking" sound, it only ever did that when it got hot, but now i dont hear it now i have the ambient air temp in here cooled. I think norton antivirus used to make it do it as well, it always reminded me of the drive had a fly in it and was flicking it out the way so it could do its job lol (very vivid imagination)

 

ok i used active smart and it says everything is ok i dont believe so though what other programs could i use

 

I noticed mine started clicking again when i installed O&O Defrag Pro, it made me very at my HD lol, i thought oh no god im jinxed here, but after i defragged my HD and restarted, it stopped doing it. there could be many a reason its clicking, if active smart says its ok, and all the thresholds are above tollerance then the HD should be fine. try a defrag of all the partitions you have on it and see if that clears it up. get back to me on that one

 

If the drive starts clacking repetadly when you first power on the PC and wont detect ...its defonitly a dead drive but thare is a chance ..... only if nothing else has worked..If you put the drive in the freezer ( yes the freezer ) for atleast 4 hours then let it warm back up to room temp....
( dont put it in the system cold !! condensation will form on it ) and make shore it is clean of all condensation it might work long enuf to back up your data its a long shot but its saved my butt a time or two ....