Hitachi Deskstar owners

Does your hitachi click?

  • Yes

    Votes: 2 18.2%

  • No

    Votes: 9 81.8%
  • Total voters
    11
P

pfunkman

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 16, 2006
Messages
3,204
I have a 160GB hitachi deskstar and i am on my third drive each one has done exactly the same thing to me. For 3-5 months it will work flawlessly then out of the blue the clicking begins :mad: its completely random and when there is no clicking the drives have all worked fine but when the clicking starts i cannot access the drive at all until its done clicking then it works like normal until its next tantrum (If the drive holds my OS it completely freezes the system until its done).

What i want to know is am i the only one? is this an isolated issue, bad luck or is hitachi really screwing up? Or is there somehow something on my end destroying these drives? I have a 320GB WD drive that has lasted through all 3 and continues to chug along without issue.

Just curious to hear others experience with these drives whil i wait for drive #4 to get back to me from RMA.
 
This will be interesting.
Hitachi bought out IBM's hard drive division after many Deskstar IBM drives (mine included!) suffered the click of death.
They became known as Deathstar drives :D
Maybe Hitachi didnt get rid of the IBM engineer who messed up the first time (j/k).

Run HDD Regenerator or Spinrite to repair the drive.
If it can be repaired its highly likely these tools can do it.

I recovered a Western Digital Drive that went in a similar way, clicking all the time.
Many hundreds of bad sectors were found and recovered and the drive has been perfect since.
 
Spinrite is $89.99, and HDD regenerator is $59.99. It will only cost me $5 to ship it to hitachi. Although those look like really cool programs my drive should just work right and thats on hitachi so ill let it be their problem.
 
Ah I assumed you wanted to recover your data,
Useful if...
 
Weird. I've not had any problems with my deskstar (250GB PATA) in the year I've had it. *knock on wood* Then again, it's been properly cooled, not moved and been on 24/7 for the most part since I bought it.
 
Nenu said:
Ah I assumed you wanted to recover your data,
Useful if...
Click to expand...

No thats the thing when its not throwing a clicking fit it works just fine so i didnt lose any data at all. Usually i get about 10 minutes between click fits and even if im copying a large file or compressing one the clicking just momentarily interruptrs it and when its done clicking things continue on like nothing happened.

So far the responses are what i was hoping for though 0-3 on the poll. Looking like i either had some bad luck or got drives from a bad batch.
 
Supposedly, Hitachi fixed the problems IBM had with their "Deathstar" line of drives many years ago. The Hitachi 80GB does just fine in my server.
 
Ok since we have 4 people voting that thier hitachis are fine could there be anything going on in my PC that could be causing these drives to fail? My WD drive has been fine through all of this im just having a hard time figuring anything could be wrong on my end but if there is i want to fix it.
 
Do the drives get hot?
If they have a temp sensor onboard, HDTune will report the temperatures of the drives.
Let us know if you can get the temps.

Most of my personal drive failures have been due to overheating.
I am repairing a laptop that overheated and ended up with thousands of bad sectors.
HDD Regenerator recovered them all (it took a few days!) with no data loss but more appeared later so the drive has been scrapped
 
I have never saw it hit higher than 30 celsius. Its in an antec 900 with the fan on medium. On an interesting I got a drive from a friend to hold my stuff so i can RMA it and found this.



That was on the motherboards end, could that really cause this kind of trouble? This cable is a new one i got out to use with this drive so it couldnt have caused trouble with my old ones :confused:
 
So i held on to the drive a little longer because i noticed its replacement was acting strangely and it turned out to be vista was the culprit this time around. Turns out one of vistas updates for power management causes drives to spin down when not being accessed then spin back up when accessed again. With the replacement drive i could actually hear it spinning up and down and with the hitachi it has always made a slight click everytime i start the computer so it makes sense now if its spinning up its going to click.

Wierd shit for certain but all is well now.

Seems to be a known problem,

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=34&threadid=2082460&STARTPAGE=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1994652&SiteID=17
 
Glad you found the solution and the faulty connector!
 
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