What are these small and big "click" sounds in my hd??

[ami500]

They reckon that you should LLF your drives every 3-4 months so they "recalibrate" themselves. As mentioned earlier in this topic, it's due to lost calibration (constant expanding and contracting does that to moving parts), and the clicking and whirring is the drive trying to align itself (seek) "on the fly" so to speak. Yea, a big hissy fit.

As for deathstars, their problem was found to be lubricant would fly up onto the heads. Their new firmware makes it so there is a random movement of the heads if it's been sitting idle for a while. But, I've had to replace one of my deathstars last year.

And the fluid in the drive is the fluid bearing for the poster that asked about that.

[ami500]

voytech wrote:

ami500 wrote:
They reckon that you should LLF your drives every 3-4 months (...)

Low Lewel Format?? You gotta be kiddin, right?? :-?

Nope. Serious.

If only I could remember where I read it. But when I read it, it made perfect sense on why to do that. But who could really be bothered to do a LLF 4 times a year? But with alignment issues being the big killer and drives with only 1 year warranties now, I think I might make the time to make them last longer.

Of course you use the software provided by your HDD manufacturer as it has the proper parameters in it for those operations.

[ami500]

Piru wrote:
@ami500

They reckon that you should LLF your drives every 3-4 months so they "recalibrate" themselves. As mentioned earlier in this topic, it's due to lost calibration (constant expanding and contracting does that to moving parts), and the clicking and whirring is the drive trying to align itself (seek) "on the fly" so to speak. Yea, a big hissy fit.

That is utter nonsense.

Nope. Serious.

If only I could remember where I read it. But when I read it, it made perfect sense on why to do that. But who could really be bothered to do a LLF 4 times a year? But with alignment issues being the big killer and drives with only 1 year warranties now, I think I might make the time to make them last longer.

That is total nonsense.

You can't low level format a modern hard drive anyway, it is done at the factory. The "low level format" you speak about is just writing the whole disk with zeros or given pattern. This does not recalibrate anything, and most certainly won't fix a dead drive.

See the previous thread about the "Low level format" for reference.

Ok then. It seems I was misinformed.

But can you answer:

1. Why is it referred to with some utilities as "restoring factory settings"?

2. Why did it "fix" the bad sectors on my deathstar before the physical damage became too great for it?

I know that you should only use utilities to LLF with from the manufacturer because they have the correct settings for their drives. Maybe the people that say they killed their drives were using 3rd party utilities and not offical ones.

[ami500]

Thanks guys.

I don't mind being told I'm wrong, just as long as it's explained and I can learn from it. Thanks.