iPod Video Clicking Sound

Invisible

My 30g iPod Video makes a very slight clicking sound whenever I transfer a file to it (but only initially, if I'm transferring lots of song, it'll make one slight click and then won't make another sound) or select a file to play from it from iTunes. I haven't dropped it or caused any damage to it and I don't remember hearing it before. It makes the clicking sound quite a few times when I restore it, as well. And after the restore, the it briefly stopped making the sound when transferring, but remained when I selected songs from it. Like I wrote above, it's very brief, just one click that sounds almost like the scroll wheel.

Without anything to compare it against and only my google searches, I must ask are these sounds normal? Or are they sounds of a dying harddrive?

DrFrylock

Hard drives make clicking noises when they do seeking. iPod drives don't seek as much because 1) they're only reading one file at a time, 2) that file is usually stored sequentially on the disk (e.g., no fragmentation), and 3) they try to do as much as possible in memory because running the disk takes battery. My iPod clicks like that but I run Rockbox so I don't know what the original vendor firmware does, but everything seems fine...

ben0207

Yeah, my old 5.5 used to do this too, and it's still working (presumably. Haven't touched it since the new Nao came out)

Invisible

ben0207 wrote: »

Yeah, my old 5.5 used to do this too, and it's still working (presumably. Haven't touched it since the new Nao came out)

Did it make it when you selected songs as well?
Because I've noticed it doing it when I select songs from the iPod itself. My brother has the same model and while he lives in a different city so I couldn't personally check it out, he says his doesn't make any sound. That's the same result I got when I checked another friend's Nano.

CailYoung

The Nano doesn't have a hard drive. Yours does. You're hearing (and possibly feeling) the drive heads moving around to cache the next chunk of songs before powering down the drive. If you're changing songs manually you'll notice it happening a lot more often.

contraband

Yep, it's the sound of the hard drive. Larger models with high capacity use hard drives to store their data. If all is going well technically, don't worry about it--it's supposed to happen.

CrossBuster

Yeah, it's just the hard drive. Think of all the noises that your computer makes when it's reading a large file.

Still, I've found that my iPod can get pretty fragmented. Because Windows detects it as an external harddrive, you can use the regular defrag utility on it. It doesn't hurt to defrag your iPod every once in a while. I've found that defragging every couple months reduces HD noises (the drive head doesn't have to move all over the disk to load a file) and keeps it performing well.