Hard drive always clicking

[batorok]

Hi,
I have a dedicated sage machine, and even when it isnt't recording it is making seek noises intermittently. I am afraid this is why I'm getting some stutter in playback. Is there a way to tell why the HD is being accessed?

my system:
single pvr250
asus a7n266-vm with add on tv out card in agp slot
athlon xp 1600+
512mb crucial pc2100
200gb seagate hdd, two partitions, video partition formatted in 64k blocks

winxp pro

latest drivers/patches/updates for all software and drivers.

[phenixdragon]

Well if it is clicking as in maybe a bad head then the HDD is gone. I would have to hear it in person but maybe you are talking about how some drive make noise when accessing the drive. IBM Deskstars did that and it freaked me out when I first started using them.

With out actually being there, I would put the HDD in another machine as a 2nd HDD and see what happens. Let Windows boot on the primary HDD and if the noise is still there then it sounds like the drive is a gone. Nothing should be accessing the drive.

[stanger89]

If it's just seek noise then it's probably just Sage reading/writing the wiz.bin or properties file (can't remember which one it's always checking on).

[batorok]

it's just the seek noise, not the click of death. the drive works fine, but sometimes I notice video stutter, and wondered if because of this seeking I was having some transfer rate problems, since my os and video are in different partitions of the same disk.

[stanger89]

I only use one disk (WD 200Gb SE) and have no trouble with Sage keeping busy while I watch something. The biggest difference between my setup and yours (one of) is that I'm using a Radeon 9500. I see your A7V uses the original nforce w/ the old Geforce2 integrated graphics, not sure if hw accelleration is applicable on that. Any chance you can try a video card in that?

I'm not sure any of that will help, I'm kind of grasping at straws here. The other big difference is that my setup is based around an Abit BE7 with an 845PE chipset.

[insomniac]

ok so...I waited 3 days to say something, but now i have semi-isolated my issue:

I too have drive clicks on a pretty brand new drive. The clicks only happen when I am accessing my server (hosting the drive) from a client!!!

Explain that! Im not crazy..lol

Ive tried to recreate this issue for all scenerios. Only client /server recreates this.

now i think to myself, "this is probably fine, self". Ahh so wrong. After a few hours of abuse from the server, my drive decides to shut down. kaput. grrrrrrrrreeeeaaaatttt. Keep in mind that this is my spare and is holding my video files. Drive dissapears in windows, sage freezes, need to reboot. server comes back up and drive is there..All diagnostics on that HD are perfect and drive is healthy.

Thigs I do know:

1. Drive is not overheating. Its in a fan cooled hot swap bay.
2. Drive seems completely healthy
3. I have yet another one of the many show stoppers for me with sage..heh

whoa...cant win

I.

[AJ Bertelson]

How full is the hard drive?

[stanger89]

You might want to check this out:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....Z2U9MQ**&p_li=

I had a problem a while ago where my 200Gb drive would shut itself down and not restart unless you turned the computer off. That (or something similar) fixed it. For this to happen the PC had to go a while without input, like at least a day, it usually would happen when I was gone for a weekend, I'd come back, turn on the TV and see "Invalid System Disk" (my OS is on the drive). It didn't seem that having Sage running was enough to keep the drive going.

Oh, I don't have it in a RAID array.

[insomniac]

I was leaving 10gig free...I have since then switched it to 60gig free to try to troubleshoot this issue.

I.

Originally posted by AJ Bertelson
How full is the hard drive?