Click of Death!

Baked.noodle

Hey all,

I have a Q6600 G0 overclocked to 3 Ghz (1.33125 volts) in a GA-P35-DS3R rev.1 (Latest BIOS) with 4GB of DDR2 800 running at 800Mhz. My idle temps are 43 43 39 38 degrees, and it never goes above 67 degrees. Until recently I had an E4400 overclocked to 3.2 Ghz in the same board without issue. Win 7 is installed to a Samsung 840 120 GB SSD, and my games are on a Seagate ST500DM002 500GB plate drive.

Recently my plate drive (bought from Amazon last January) started clicking briefly after I returned from playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 to main screen of the game. Once I exited the game entirely it stopped. On another occasion I was using CCleaner to remove deleted files and it clicked for about 20 seconds. Today when I booted the machine it loaded up Win7 but my mouse would not respond and I could hear clicking coming from the hard disk. I shut down windows using the keyboard but the machine just hung shutting down whilst the drive continued to click. I powered off the machine holding down the power button. When I restarted the machine it booted up without issue.

Seagate SeaTools can find nothing wrong with the drive; neither can the Win7 Check disk utility. Other than this, the machine seems to be stable. Could my overclock be causing this clicking? Perhaps the voltages from the PSU (Corsair Builder CX600 V2) have caused instability? Will the drive, which is still under warranty, fail soon? I have all my important files saved to an external drive. Thanks.

Edit: I bought the motherboard in 08 I think.

yoyo

Make sure to run a long test in Seatools and also I'd recommend the bootable Dos version of Seatools and not the windows one

Nick

Baked.noodle

Thanks for your interest.

I ran the dos version of SeaTools and it reported the disk to be fine. I haven't had any computer irregularities today, but I suspect the clicking will return. Considering the fact my power supply has six SATA power connectors, I assume I can conclude that the plate disk is receiving the correct power. Having passed every test, I assume the drive will pass any RMA inspection so I believe the best course of action is to sit back and wait for the plate drive to seize up and die. That is of courses if you or anybody else can not suggest a further course of inquiry. Thanks.

BloodBath

Back up what you can/need now and RMA the drive. It should still be under warranty.

Check the SMART data with CrystalDiskInfo. Post a screengrab of it here if you want.

Also check Windows Event Viewer around the time of your system freeze. If it is HDD related there should be an entry there.

Baked.noodle

Here is a screen shot of CrystalDiskInfo.

ST5000M002 Crystal Disk Info.PNG

Event viewer has one critical error: The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

Last Christmas my old drive failed suddenly. This Plate drive was the replacement. The old drive didn't click, it simply stopped working when configured to AHCI. Nevertheless I could use the old drive in IDE mode. I realize the clicking would indicate a different fault, but I still wonder if my motherboard, which is set to overclock the CPU, could be causing these faults somehow?

EDIT: the drive just started acting up after I installed the Q6600 and overclocked it to 3Ghz

whizbang

Its possible the data speed to/from the drive is too fast for it to cope. How did you get the speed up ?
If its the same clock that runs the Sata controller, then this maybe is an issue.

Can you reduce the interface speed to test this 1.5/3Gbs?
the buffer size is also relevant - was the old drive bigger ?

Clicking is generally when the Drive head has lost its position- it returns to zero to reposition itself. Can indicate power is not good. (among other things). Do you believe everything the power supply has written on it ?

Baked.noodle

whizbang wrote: »

Its possible the data speed to/from the drive is too fast for it to cope. How did you get the speed up ?
If its the same clock that runs the Sata controller, then this maybe is an issue.

Can you reduce the interface speed to test this 1.5/3Gbs?
the buffer size is also relevant - was the old drive bigger ?

Clicking is generally when the Drive head has lost its position- it returns to zero to reposition itself. Can indicate power is not good. (among other things). Do you believe everything the power supply has written on it ?

Hi,

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by getting the speed up. Do you refer to the speed of the hard drive? It's a SATA 600 drive connected to a SATA 300 controller. I examined the features in the BIOS but could not find any setting that my limit or change hard disk behaviour, except when it comes to settings for SATA/AHCI/IDE. With regard to the Buffer size, this drive has 16Mb, and I believe the old drive had 8 to 16Mb. The old drive had 500Mb capacity. I know my PSU isn't top of the line, but I have read and watched reviews on the internet and it would seem to be a competent PSU.

whizbang

Sorry, I meant the Processor speed. It probably wont make any difference, but you should take it back to standard freq. to test the disk performance, before deciding anything else.

Baked.noodle

I'll do that. Considering the drive passes the tests even when the pc is overclocked I suppose the best way to test the disk is to copy and delete some large files. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks.

Baked.noodle

Have had the system at stock for a day. No hard disk clicking. I'll bump it back up to 3Ghz with a bit more voltage and see if that works.

Baked.noodle

I've had the processor overclocked to 3Ghz with more voltage for the last day and a bit, and I've had zero issues with the hard disk, so my suspicion the overclock was the culprit seems likely. The system isn't 100% stable though, as I had graphical anomalies on my TV whilst watching a film. The picture was pink, until I cycled the TV, and just then the sound, which comes through a stereo system attached to the headphone jack on the TV, was distorted. I rebooted the machine and all worked fine. I have seen the pink screen on this PC once before, and it hasn't happened for about a year. It probably has more to do with my GPU than anything else. I'm not worried about it.

I'm surprised the overclock caused the plate drive to click, but this would seem to be the case. I couldn't find anywhere on the net that had discussed a similar problem. Anyway, thanks for your help. I'll update in a week or so.

Baked.noodle

Well, it been just under a week and I've had zero issues. I believe the whole pink screen issue that happened last Monday was probably a HDMI handshake issue. It hasn't happened all week so I'm golden. To sum up, If overclocking a Q6600 on a Gigabyte P35 and your hard disk starts clicking, bump up the voltage a bit. Ya never know. Thanks for all the help.