[ltp] Harddrive Clicking

[Christian Fromme]

On 19.09. 18:51, Sebastian Geiger wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> after having written that I exchanged my build in 120GB Hitachi drive
> for a 320GB Seagate (ST9320421AS) drive last week, I now find, that I
> hear a strange clicking sound some times. Being on Windows this is
> almost all the time the case, while being on Linux it is only from time
> to time. I belive the sound comes from the head loading and parking,
> since the sound is more like two rapid clicks, rather than one. Having
> read the following article:
> "http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking" I still
> have no solution.
> 
> I tried all of the commands, with the result, that the 193 load cycle
> count increased over night from 1400 to 2500 and the laptop would wake
> up from suspend immediately after successfully suspending. A reboot fix
> that, since these commands are not permanent. Various hard drive checks,
> including the SeaTools Dos version (boot cd) and the bios build in hdd
> diagnosis programm confirmed that the drive is ok. I also tried running
> MHDD (a dos programm) but it can not access the drive. In AHCI mode it
> will say drive busy (not ready or something like that). Once I also got
> that the drive is ATA Password protectet, also I have not set a
> password. In Compatibility mode MHDD would just freeze and not respond.
> SeaTools reported that the drive was "Security Freeze Locked" which
> means that no Password can be set on the drive afaik.
> 
> I tried using hdparm -B ... /dev/sda with the numbers 255, 254 and 128
> having no success what so ever, except that it breaks suspend to ram.
> Besides the clicking being very annoying I am worried that I will
> decrease my hard drive life time. Does anyone have experienced similar
> things with their hard drive?

Have you checked values as described on the referenced site with:

	# smartctl -A /dev/sda

This showed increases on a certain value with every click for me.

HTH,
Christian