Hard drive reads a lit-tle too regularly.

October 23, 2009 11:41 AM

My hard drive reads data like clockwork. Really! What's going on here?

Usually a hard drive when it reads something sounds random:

BRRP, BRP brp e drp. . .clackity clackity clack brp brp brrrrp.

But periodically my computer slips into this very rhythmic mode and the hard drive reads something small every second on the second. It's so rythmic you could almost time an egg with it:

brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .brp. . .

I think it slows my computer down so I might want to do something about it. I know millions of computers must do this because just about every computer I've owned or used over the past several years has this "feature."

Is this a "virtual memory" thing? A house keeping function? Does any computer maven out there know what this extremely rythmic read is?

posted by Lord Fancy Pants to computers & internet (25 comments total)

It's most likely the click of death. If you haven't already, and it sounds like the sound file in the link, back up your data.
posted by eschatfische at 11:44 AM on October 23

Or maybe it's got to seek all over the place because your disk is vary fragmented.
posted by Obscure Reference at 11:47 AM on October 23

That sounds like a lot of retries, which means the HD is about to bag it.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:47 AM on October 23

Could you rule out operating system issues by booting into the BIOS and just sitting there? Don't do anything, just let it run. If you start to hear the repetitive sound, it could very well be an indication of imminent failure.

This isn't really a big deal though, since you can just pull your important files off the backup you have. Right? Right?
posted by odinsdream at 11:49 AM on October 23 [1 favorite]

eschatfische,

Wow! That sounds awful! My sound doesn't sound that alien. And I may have experienced the click of death on a previous machine (to my dismay). Sounds familiar.

What I have sounds like a very short but healthy "read" (brp) every second as opposed to something like a solenoid trying to engage (which is what I liken the "click of death" to).

Thanks,
LFP
posted by Lord Fancy Pants at 11:53 AM on October 23

Windows or Mac? Safari (v4.0.3 under OS-X) will do this. It drove me nuts the first couple of times (since I seldom use Safari, I had to figure it out several times before I caught on). I started Safari about a minute ago to look up its version for this answer. It's already cycling my disk.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 11:54 AM on October 23

• Backup your data. An external USB drive is best for getting your data off now now now, but consider an online backup solution for the future, that way you have one backup onsite, and one offsite.
• Defrag.
• Hope for the best, or buy your local nerd dinner and drinks in exchange for a an hour or two of diagnosis and cleanup of your machine.

posted by terpia at 11:59 AM on October 23

You can use the very well regarded Parted Magic Live Linux distribution. This distribution has tools to analyse a hard disk and most file system types... and can report on a disks S.M.A.R.T analysis. It is a staple of my software "toolbox" for hardware analysis.

Just download the archive, de-compress, and burn the ISO.

Reboot from the CD... and proceed as necessary.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 12:02 PM on October 23

[meant to add:]

Try running Process Manager/Activity Monitor/etc., sorted by CPU demand and watch for what process keeps appearing near the top of the list. If it's an application, and the cycling stops when you quit it, then it's probably not due to an impending hardware failure.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 12:02 PM on October 23

And btw, I have Windows XP. Also, the rythmic "read" goes away after (sometimes) quite a long time and then the hard drive behaves normally. I can't tell when the period of "rythmic read" will come up but everytime it has come up it has gone away with no need to re-boot and no crash. It recurs but not frequently.

I've tolerated it on one of my machines for quite some time with no crash but I'm thinking it may be time to do something about it if not for safety sake then just because I'm impatient with the slow down in internet and computing when it happens.
posted by Lord Fancy Pants at 12:08 PM on October 23

If you just want to read SMART status values you can use this utility.
posted by odinsdream at 12:22 PM on October 23

... but really, you need to be able to say "It's perfectly fine if my hard drive dies, because everything important to me is backed up. After all, a hard drive is a mechanical device which is guaranteed to fail eventually."
posted by odinsdream at 12:24 PM on October 23

Odds that this is a virus scanner doing a routine file system check?

Next time this happens, open Task Manager (make sure you are viewing processes from all users) or Process Explorer (if you have it*) and check the process list. What background processes do you notice when you hear this? Do any of them go away (or drop significantly in memory usage) after it stops?

*Process Explorer can be obtained for free from WinInternals. It and the other utilities available are darn handy at times.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:26 PM on October 23 [1 favorite]

I have an external USB drive that does this since it was new. It basically does nothing until it's been idle for a while, then click.......click.......click....... If I make it do something, the click stops. It's at least two years old and I use it all the time. My point is that you might be having a click of death but I would not necessarily assume so. You should still be backing up in any case.

My other point is that it isn't necessarily anything your computer is doing. Hard drives and their controllers are fully capable of making drives do stupid things all on their own.
posted by chairface at 12:30 PM on October 23

My XP machine (which later died of reasons altogether unrelated to hard drive failure) used to make these rhythmic read-brrps especially when I was working with Corel Photo Paint and the scanner. It didn't do this with other applications. It made me nervous too, but I got a whole book with one heap of scans written without any problem, and I doodle a lot with my photos, too. Defrag didn't help against this sound effect. I just took it as some quirk.
posted by Namlit at 12:39 PM on October 23

I wonder if that was the Indexing Service?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:42 PM on October 23

It's quite likely that it's doing "thermal recallibration" or "wear-leveling". A brief (old) explanation here and here. It shouldn't slow your computer down, as it's usually something that only kicks in when the drive is idle. I've had several hard drives that did this, and they weren't on the road to failure. Of course, you should always back up just in case.
posted by dhalgren at 12:51 PM on October 23

Clacking and beeping from your hard drive is a very bad sign.

1. Install SpeedFan. It's free.
2. Click on the S.M.A.R.T. Tab. This displays info from the drive's built-in error reporting.
3. ">Look at the fitness bar at the bottom of the window. Look at the Attribute column.

Is the Fitness bar only a few blue blocks long? Is anything red? If yes, shut down your machine. Go buy another drive. Bring it home, install it, and copy everything you must save to the new drive. Do not wait. Do not wait. Do not wait.

If you need to scare yourself into doing this, press the [Perform an in-depth online analysis of this hard disk] button and read the results of the web page that pops up.
posted by clarknova at 12:55 PM on October 23

"Look at" link above should go here.
posted by clarknova at 1:01 PM on October 23

Is there a background process running that would be accessing the disk at roughly the same intervals as the click? It could be lots of things - a logging program, a search indexer, etc.
posted by chrisamiller at 1:12 PM on October 23

I've been chasing something similar down on my XP SP3 machine for a long time.

Using Filemon and Process Explorer, I find that there is something called 'provisioning' that is going on that involves the OS checking for a file, not finding it, and recording the details in a log file.

I have selectively turned off a lot of stuff, and spent maybe 12 hours total in the unsuccessful hunt for the culprit. I have turned off damn near everything using Autoruns and Ultimate Troubleshooter.

Sometimes, I'd kill a process that I suspected, only to have it restart itself, which really complicates definitively identifying the gremlin.

I've come to the conclusion that it's something in .NET, and/or a leftover from an AV program.

I've also come to the conclusion that it is MY problem. My computer doesn't get tired of doing the same thing over and over, but I do prefer that they shut up when unoccupied.

Hell, it's Windows. When it's running right, I don't like it that much. Gotta keep things in perspective.
posted by FauxScot at 1:19 PM on October 23

Another possible diagnostic tool is a Linux live CD. Boot from it, mount your computer's internal HD and surf for awhile (assuming that the clicking would start if you did this in Windows). Does your disk still misbehave? If not, it's probably something in your OS, not your hardware.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 2:08 PM on October 23

I think I've heard clicks of death that were not nearly as rhythmic as the one on the wikipedia page. But I'm not an expert.
posted by sully75 at 3:55 PM on October 23

FauxScot is on the right track. The Sysinternals Process Explorer and Process Monitor can help you determine whether there is a running process which is responsible for the disk accesses.
posted by Galvatron at 8:31 PM on October 23

With the caveat that IANYComputerNerd, I would guess that this isn't the click of death. Much more likely, it's the Windows data cache periodically flushing unwritten data to disk. From this link (emphasis mine):

The frequency at which flushing occurs is an important consideration that balances system performance with system reliability. If the system flushes the cache too often, the number of large write operations flushing incurs will degrade system performance significantly. If the system is not flushed often enough, then the likelihood is greater that either system memory will be depleted by the cache, or a sudden system failure (such as a loss of power to the computer) will happen before the flush. In the latter instance, the cached data will be lost.

To ensure that the right amount of flushing occurs, the cache manager spawns a process every second called a lazy writer. The lazy writer process queues one-eighth of the pages that have not been flushed recently to be written to disk. It constantly reevaluates the amount of data being flushed for optimal system performance, and if more data needs to be written it queues more data. Lazy writers do not flush temporary files, because the assumption is that they will be deleted by the application or system.

Anecdotally, I've heard the same thing from my (presumably fully-functional) Vista machine.

I know this is a bit late, but I'm a bit behind in Google Reader. Sorry.
posted by stufflebean at 12:08 AM on October 27