Hard Drive: Click of Death? (Edit: possibly more general problem)

Delzhand

My hard drive has recently started clicking. Some preliminary google research indicates that the sound it makes is sorta like the "Click of Death", but it isn't constant. It will just click a handful of times, but it's getting more frequent.

I found some information suggesting a heavily fragmented drive will do this, but my defragger runs on a regular schedule.

It's a 4-5 year old Dell Inspiron laptop, and I don't know if it is in fact the hard drive, or if failure is imminent. I've got my most important data backed up on an external.

There aren't any performance issues with the laptop that can't be explained by it's age or specs. Even when I hear the clicking it's not like there's any noticeable performance chance.

Any ideas?

Edit: As I was switching tabs around, it almost seemed to start clicking in response to big on-screen changes. Sometimes the screensaver coming up starts it too, but I can't reproduce it.

soxbox

First step should be getting something to view your SMART stats on your drive.

Maybe http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm ?

See whether there's any error stats.

Delzhand

It says all the values are OK.

*** DiskCheckup V3.0 Build: 1006 Report ***

SysInfo DLL Version: SysInfo v1.0 Build: 1008
Time of export: 19:43:17 30-Jan-2011

Device information:
Device ID: 0
Interface: ATA
Device Capacity: 76316 MB
Serial Number: WD-WXE207007086
Model Number: WDC WD800BEVS-75RST0
Firmware Revision: 04.01G04
Partitions:
C: 76316 MB

ATA information:

Disk geometry:
Cylinders: 9729
Tracks/Cylinder: 255
Sectors/Track: 63
Bytes/Sector: 512
Total disk sectors: 156301488
Logical sector size: 512
Physical sector size: 512
Media rotation rate: N/A
Buffer size: 8192 KB
ECC size: 50 Bytes

Standards compliance:
ATA8-ACS Supported: No
ATA/ATAPI-7 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-6 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-5 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-4 Supported: Yes
World Wide ID: 50014EE25574304C

Feature support:
SMART supported: Yes
SMART enabled: Yes
SMART self-test supported: Yes
SMART error log supported: Yes
LBA supported: Yes
IORDY supported: Yes
CFast supported: No
DMA supported: Yes
Maximum Multiword DMA mode supported: 2
Multiword DMA selected: None
Maximum UltraDMA mode supported: 6
UltraDMA selected: 5
Maximum PIO mode supported: 4
SATA Compliance: Yes
NCQ priority information supported: No
Unload while NCQ commands are outstanding supported: No
Phy Event Counters supported: Yes
Receipt of power management requests supported: Yes
NCQ feature set supported: Yes
SATA Gen2 Signaling Speed (3.0Gb/s) supported: No
SATA Gen1 Signaling Speed (1.5Gb/s) supported: Yes
Software Settings Preservation: Supported, Enabled
In-order data delivery: Not supported
Initiating power management: Supported, Enabled
DMA Setup auto-activation: Supported, Disabled
Non-zero buffer offsets: Not supported
Trusted Computing supported: No
Host Protected Area (HPA) supported: Yes
Read look-ahead supported: Yes
Read look-ahead enabled: Yes
Write cache supported: Yes
Write cache enabled: Yes
Power management supported: Yes
Security mode supported: Yes
Security mode enabled: No
Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) supported: Yes
48bit Addressing supported: Yes
Auto Acoustic Managment (AAM) supported: Yes
Auto Acoustic Managment (AAM) enabled: No
Power-up in Standby (PUIS) supported: No
Advanced Power Management (APM) supported: Yes
Advanced Power Management (APM) enabled: Yes
Current APM level: Minimum power consumption without Standby
CompactFlash Association (CFA) supported: No
General Purpose Logging (GPL) supported: Yes
Streaming supported: No
Media card pass through supported: No
Extended power conditions supported: No
Extended status reporting supported: No
Write-read-verify supported: No
Free-fall control supported: No
TRIM command supported: No
SCT command transport supported: Yes
NV Cache enabled: No
NV Cache Power Management supported: No

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Status Value Worst Threshold Raw Value TEC

---

1 Raw Read Error Rate OK 200 200 51 8 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time OK 159 156 21 1008 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count OK 98 98 0 2777 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count OK 200 200 140 0 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate OK 100 253 51 0 N.A.
9 Power On Time OK 67 67 0 24291 N.A.
10 Spin Retry Count OK 100 100 51 0 N.A.
11 Calibration Retry Count OK 100 100 51 0 N.A.
12 Power Cycle Count OK 98 98 0 2643 N.A.
192 Power off Retract Count OK 200 200 0 211 N.A.
193 Load Cycle Count OK 50 50 0 450096 N.A.
194 Temperature OK 99 85 0 44 C N.A.
196 Reallocation Event Count OK 200 200 0 0 N.A.
197 Current Pending Sector Count OK 200 200 0 0 N.A.
198 Uncorrectable Sector Count OK 100 253 0 0 N.A.
199 UltraDMA CRC Error Count OK 200 200 0 0 N.A.
200 Write Error Count OK 100 253 51 0 N.A.