Why does Click-of-Death occur for HardDrives?

[quantass]

My HDD: Maxtor 5T060H6 60 Gig, 7200 RPM, UDM100 under Windows 2000 Pro. At the moment it's experiencing some serious problems, clicking and whining and eventually locking up the operating system. I've gathered that this is likely the Click-Of-Death for Harddrives. I've never heard of such things. I've always had the impression that HDDs were incredibly reliable, so much so that one could last for nearly a decade or at least become so obsolete that the user would eventually upgrade never actually experiencing any HDD issues.

Can someone please explain to me why the Click-of-Death occurs for a HDD? Is it because of long-term abuse of insufficient power, or poor ventilation, or perhaps mileage?

And is the ONLY solution to resolving the HDD problem is to purchase a new harddrive?

Thank you.

[Midknyte]

Hard drives are mechanical, so it's not if it's going to break, it's when. That's why hard drives are given a MTBF (mean time between failures). It could be a bad controller or motor. It's difficult to say.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=MTBF

[Terminator]

Most common failure is the actuator that moves the heads across the platters. It will lose its lubrication after time and has trouble moving the heads and hence failure. Remember the heads are EXTREMELY close to the surface of the platters, they actually flout on top of the air are the platters spin. Clicking is usually the actuators struggling to move. There is no way to repair hard drives. Open them up and they are dead but air contamination.
Reason for failure is probably due to manufacturing quality and usage. Powering up and down is the most stressful time for hard drives. Other problems can be the spindle that the platters spin on, again because of lubrication and wear. Nowadays I only buy fluid dynamic drives because they used fluid instead of ball bearings.
Back up your important data before it dies completely.

T

:t

[quantass]

Christ, there goes 60 gigs down the drain.

Thanks a lot guys. The provided information was exactly what i was looking for!

[Mm9004]

Hey terminator, you seem to be somewhat of an athority on HDD failures.

Tell me what is worse on a HDD:

1. Power Cut shutdown OR

2. O/S defined shutdown?

It seems that the HDD would have to work more to use the O/S but I'm not so sure.

[Terminator]

Good point. Obviously your better getting the OS to shut down because the system is closing files etc but that not what you want to know. I'd say that a power cut shutdown is worse because the heads could still be on the platters especially if it was accessing data when the power cut occurs. As far as I know the drives usually receive a signal to move the heads away from the platters during proper shutdown.
Long ago there a procedure called parking that the drives had to be specifically given to park the heads away from the platters before shutting down the drive. This was when we had the likes of 40Mb to about 120MB drives (very low capacity by todays standards).
The different manufacturers might have considered power failure in their new design and made the heads move away by some possible safety mecanism to prevent any possible damage but I'm not sure.
So in summary I'd say a power failure or just hitting the power off button is more harmful.

T

:t