Strange Drive Behaviour in RAID (spinning and clicking).

Albaba · 11 Feb 2019 at 16:59

Hi,

I have 2x 500gb WD mechanical drives in RAID1 that get used as my incoming/downloads drive. The drives are ancient so when about a week ago one of them started spinning up then clicking repeatedly i didn't think much of it and just retired the drive and replaced it with a much newer Seagate and rebuilt the RAID.

Now it gets strange. The replacement drive is behaving in a very similar fashion albeit in a less clunky/clicky way. After say 20 or so minutes i can hear the drive spin up and then a slight click in a loop. If i access the drive the clicking stops for 20 or so minutes.

I have swapped the drives sata cables over to see if that helps and no change. I then decided to just unplug the Seagate leaving one WD in degraded array, and guess what, that is doing a similar thing, more like a ticking read sound this time.....

Any ideas?

Albaba · 11 Feb 2019 at 17:01

Oh also, I have 2x 1TB Firecuda in RAID1 and 2x Samsung 850evo 500gb connected to the same Intel controller and they are behaving just fine. Board is Maximus Hero VIII...

[Darkend]Viper · 14 Feb 2019 at 16:25

Could potentially be the WD drive starting to fail and it might be that your hearing not the seagate? Have you got another drive to replace the WD and let it rebuild from the Seagate that replaced the failed WD drive last time?

Albaba · 15 Feb 2019 at 09:16

Thanks for the reply.

I def took the correct clicking drive out. Here's what is strange, i stumbled on a post on a WD forum and somebody suggested checking power management in control panel. It was set to power off drives after 20 minutes, i turned this to off and it seems to have fixed the issue. Why it started happening in the first place I have no idea as I haven't changed anything in the power management settings :/

I wonder if there is some issues with powering down some drives in RAID....

Still doesn't explain why it would just start happening. I'll keep my eye on things for now..

EsaT · 15 Feb 2019 at 10:16

So what sound of these did they make?

https://datacent.com/failing_hard_drive_sounds