Hard Drive bootup clicking

[leo2kp]

So I have this relatively new WD Enterprise 320GB hard drive (6 months old?) and when I turn on my computer it makes a single "Click". I have two other drives in RAID-0, both WD Enterprise disks, and neither of them make that single "Click" when I first boot up. Only the backup drive does that. I've been working with PCs for at least 10 years and I've normally associated any clicking noise with a dying HDD. I've run every test known to man on all my drives and nothing seems to be wrong. Of course, you don't know until it just dies one day.

One thing I will note is that a few months ago my SATA cable somehow sucked and I needed to replace it. It would at times disconnect (due to a bad wire or something on the cord) and cause the drive to go in to standby mode and I'd get a BSOD because the disk suddenly disappeared. Since I've installed the new cable it has never done that. So I was wondering maybe the frequent status change/reboots due to the SATA cable somehow caused the circuitry to become faulty and create that "Click" during power up.

Is a single "Click" when turning on the PC normal for a brand new Enterprise, server-class hard drive, or should I RMA it for another one?

 

[XrayMan]

The only info I can lend you is from past experience. I had a Maxtor 300gb sata hard drive start clicking all of a sudden. It died about 2 months later. Hope that helps.

 

[omnislash]

Yeah sadly, a clicking harddrive means that its on its death bed... i suggest that you back up all data,

and replace the drive asap,

only yeaterday i drunkenly dropped my lappy and killed a hardrive, and whenever the damaged sector(s) was scanned all i heard was the dreaded "click" "click"


(on a side note why are 2.5" sata drives so gard to find?, they all seem to be PATA grrrrrrr)

 

[HenrikG]

(on a side note why are 2.5" sata drives so gard to find?, they all seem to be PATA grrrrrrr)

They want to get rid of old stock... you're simply a pawn in their grand scheme.

As for the hard-drive, yeah... it's gonna die. No telling how soon though. May I suggest not turning it off until you get a new one.

 

[leo2kp]

Yeah it worries me a little too much to let it go until it dies. I'm in contact with WD about it right now so I'll probably back it up on to my RAID-0 (ironic lol) until I get another backup disk. I might even consider RAID-1 for my backup in the near future.

Thanks for the answers =)