Firefox makes HDD click!

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hello everyone,

My 640GB Black AALS is making some sort of clicking or ticking sound (counted 9 today and they seem to have a pattern). I started to notice it about 2 weeks ago and only occours the first time I start Mozilla Firefox 3 everytime I reboot. It does not seem to happen with any other program.

Are those normal Spin-Up sounds or is my drive failing? WinDLG tells me that the drive is fine.

2

Yup your drive is fine. ALL mechanical HDD’s will click when read/writing information. Sometimes it’s just more noticeable than others. I bet if you listen real carefully ,you will notice it with other tasks as well.

3

That’s good news, thx.

4

It all depends on the clicking sound.

Drive do make sounds when they work, and they also make sounds when something is wrong.

The worst case scenario is that your drive has some bad sector right were some of Firefox’s files are placed, and it clicks while trying to read that file… I’m not saying this is the case for you, it really does depend on the sounds your drive makes (and which I cannot hear).

If there’s no trouble and you have the time, you can do a complete surface/sector scan (with either Windows’ chkdsk, HD Tune or some other program). After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry :wink:

5

I am the guy that started one of these clicking sound threads. I don’t have Firefox on this PC. I have two other PCs with Western Digital hard drives and they don’t click, and I do have Firefox on them… One of them is a blue label and the other is a black label. The blue is a PATA drive and the other is a SATA.

This PC with my clicking complaint has a pretty constant clicking regular clock like sound, that is concerning, and the drive is only weeks old.  Sometimes the clicking sound becomes more subdued and at other times it is more pronounced.

OH well, its back-up twin is in there now, if the C: drive decides to die.