Samsung hard drive head parking

The heads parking might be one or two clicks, but if you're hearing clicking going on for 45 seconds AND if it's not the computer accessing the drive then it's probably thermal recalibration. The platters on the drive expand as it warms up so from time to time the controller seeks to various tracks to recalibrate the tables it uses to control how much current to feed the head actuator to access each track. There's nothing you can do about this - it's an important part of how the drive works. The only solution is to buy a drive that's quieter.

But it's also possible that it's just your computer accessing the drive, particularly if it's the OS drive. You can check this by running Resource Monitor (Start -> type "Resource Monitor" into the search box, click the "Resource Monitor" link) and selecting the "Disk" tab. If you see activity in the disk graphs then that's probably what's causing the clicking.

Whatever is going on can't be "an important part of how the drive works". The drive grinds to a halt, making it not useable. That isn't how a drive is supposed to work. I've looked at the resource meter and nothing is accessing the drive.

I've spent many months on this issue, and there is an issue with some drives not doing head parking the way they are supposed to. I even found threads in the archive here about this exact problem, but the threads I've found so far don't give a solution.

Does anyone know how to adjust the frequency of a drive attempting to park the heads?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you said. I thought you meant that the drive made clicking sounds for 45 seconds. If so, that wouldn't be the drive spinning down - it only takes a few seconds to spin down and then the drive would be silent until it started to spin back up again. Did I misunderstand? What exactly does the 45 seconds refer to - are you saying that the drive spins down AFTER 45 seconds?

What kind of drive is it? It's perfectly normal for "green" drives to spin down - it's part of their strategy to conserve power. As far as I know there's no way to change this "feature" of a "green" drive.

Ok, so what do you think it could be?

The drive doesn't spin down, it just makes the click noise, similar to the click you would expect to hear if the drive was head parking. It's as if it is attempting to park, but it unable to, so it keeps trying for 30 to 45 seconds. Or it is just parking when it shouldn't and so it immediately comes out, but then tries to park again right away. While it is trying the computer becomes unuseable. The drive never spins down, parks, and is idle. All you hear is the clicking, as if it is trying to park but can't.

Sounds like the "click of death". I'd backup all the data on the drive and replace it before it totally dies.

The drive functions normally, right? You're able to read and write data and you're not getting any errors? If you try to access the drive while it's clicking, does it work normally? If you run a utility such as DiskCheckup to show the SMART data, are the error counts staying the same before and after the clicking?

Does the drive make similar sounds as the system is booting? If so, then that's the normal sound of the head seeking.

If all that's true, then what you've described is either thermal recalibration (probably less likely on modern drives) or it's the system accessing the drive for some reason - you can use Resource Monitor as I described above to check for that.

The drive functions normally, except when the clicking is happening. When it is clicking, everything freezes until the clicking is done.

Sometimes it clicks during boot up, and when it does, it significantly slows boot time. Yesterday it was clicking so much while booting that I got an error that said the hard drive was unable to seat. I restarted and it booted fine.

Have you looked at the SMART data (see my previous post) to see if the error counts are increasing after the clicking occurs? If they are, it's a sure sign that the drive has a problem.