Basically, a few days a go I got a new hard drive (seagate barracuda 500GB) and it clicks. I'm not sure if they are just the noise my hard drives makes anyway, or whether or not its a sign of a defective drive. They only make the noise when the hard drive is being accessed (starting up large programs like OopenOffice and F-spot, or when I'm scanning my music library in quod-libet. I recorded the sounds to post (since I'm aware 'clicking' is a vague description of the sound) and they are here and here. (They are recorded in Ogg Vorbis, just so people know) The first recording was taken inside the computer casing, and the second from outside (with a mobile phone, so the quality's not great but they give you an idea of the noise my computers making) As I said, is this a normal (if not healthy) sound form my hard drive to be making? Or should I back up quickly and get a replacement drive? I have been advised to do a check using smartctl Code: sudo smartctl -Ha /dev/sda which turned up these results which turned up very high Raw_Read_Error_Rate, Seek_Error_Rate and Hardware_ECC_Recovered values. I was told this was hailing the death of my hard drive, but then someone else told me that seagates often show up these kinds of errors, and my drive could last for another 10 years (but it'd be best to keep a backup) I'm just interested in another opinion from people more knowledgeable than I! Thanks in advance, Civ
The advice you got was on target... it could be nothing or something. Better to be safe than sorry since it is under warranty. I would take it back for another one.
