Hard Drive Tapping Sound?

yeahme

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Aug 19, 2011
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Hi all,
I've recently built my first computer and bought a new Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB SATAIII HDD as a secondary storage device, while I have a Kingston SSD for Windows and applications. The HDD itself works fine but the problem is that since I bought the hard drive off amazon and installed it it has made this annoying tapping sound at very irregular intervals. There's seems to be no rhyme nor reason to when the tapping starts, it could be soon after I boot up my PC or it could be after several hours of use. The tapping usually only lasts for about a minute or two, then stops and could be quiet for anything between ten minutes and several hours.

I have googled the problem and found several pages about it but I'm getting conflicting information about what it is and no specific solutions. So I'm not sure if there is something I can do to fix it or if I should simply send it back and hope the next one doesn't do the same thing. Anyway if anybody knows anything about this problem or what the cause of it is I'd be grateful for any information or advise. Thanks
 

yeahme

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Aug 19, 2011
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Thanks.
I've checked that out on youtube and wikipedia and to me it doesn't really sound like the problem I'm having. The tapping I'm hearing sounds more like a radiator warming up and the "taps" come about two seconds after each other rather than the more continuous sound of the "click of death". Also it seems to occasionally just make one tap on its own rather than a whole lot of taps together which to me suggests some other problem.

I've read about something called "shock protection/detection" that can cause this kind of problem and that disabling it can resolve it, would you happen to know anything about that?
 

yeahme

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Aug 19, 2011
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Ok I shall have to give that a try. I've been putting off updating my bios for quite a while now after reading numerous dire warnings about what can happen if it goes wrong.
Anyway thanks for your help.
 

When you venture into updating (flashing) the BIOS do it EXACTLY as recommended by your motherboard manufacturer. Power failures during BIOS updating can cause huge problems!