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

[Piru]

@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.

[Piru]

@GreggBz

Yes, the firmware in modern hardrives prevents you from low level formating it in most cases. However, you can download utilities usually from the HD manufacturer that allow you to do this type of thing. I'm not really sure they actually reset all the bits to zero though.

These tools don't low level format, they just write the disk full of 0 or 1 or some specific pattern.

Again: Modern drives are low level formatted only once, at the factory.

[Piru]

@ami500

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

Probably the disk is wiped with 0 and initial MBR is written. This is likely to be the "factory setup", so the tool restores it. It only restores the logical layout, not physical.

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

Usually hard drives map out bad blocks automagically without ever letting the OS know about it (except perhaps thru SMART). Having bad blocks is normal to some extent, and each and every hard disk has them, no matter how high quality.

However, when the problems grow too severe, the error is actually passed to the caller aswell. If the drive ever report physical error to OS, it means the disk is seriously hosed, and needs to be replaced. Recovering it by "format" might help temporarily, but you should not use the disk for storing any important data, as the problem is likely to get only worse. Eventually the disk will go permanently dead.