New
#1
HDD spinning down/clicking every 30 seconds
Hi there, first-time poster here. Usually I'm one to exhaust every single possibility before asking for help, but as of right now I am rather desperate to find an answer because this issue is driving me MAD.
As stated in the title, my second HDD (Samsung HD155UI, 1,5 TB) is, as of today, clicking every 30 seconds, as in briefly parking the head or something. I've been using that drive for over 3 years without one single problem, and only recently (i.e. less than a week ago) did I upgrade to Windows 10 - while at the same time swapping out some parts for good measure - CPU, Motherboard, GPU and RAM. Of course I did the whole clean install shebang, and in the beginning everything ran absolutely smoothly. Installed all of my apps and drivers, moved all of my data back, and no problems whatsoever. Yes, Windows is activated.
Now today I'm playing - ironically - Clicker Heroes on Steam. I usually leave it idling in the background while I'm doing other stuff on the PC, however I've started to notice this regular clicking sound. At first I thought it was my external hard drive - turned that off, no dice. Eavesdropped into my PC and quickly found out it was the secondary HDD, as my main SSD couldn't possibly be the source of the noise. Panic ensued, immediately ran a backup in case the drive went south. During the backup, no clicking whatsoever. After it was done, the clicking resumed.
Chkdsk'd the quick way, and once with /r - during the checks, the drive's quiet as a ninja, but once those completed without errors, click. Click. Click.
CrystalDiskInfo also shows my Drive in good health, and I have the latest firmware for it too. Event viewer showed no irregularities (apart from one single "ID 157 - Disk 2 has been surprise removed"), so I thought it must be some idle setting or power management thing. Checked power options a thousand times, "turn off hard disk after" setting was initially at 20, I set it to 0, then 60, then 120. Nothing changed whatsoever.
BIOS power management settings are all turned off as far as I am concerned. Pretty sure I combed everything through, unless there's some hidden setting.
Now, cue the Resource monitor. It clearly shows some activity spikes (blue curve) every time the drive clicks, which happens exactly every 30 seconds. However, I cannot for the life of me identify what it is that is causing these spikes.
At some point I suspected something with the Chipset or something, maybe RST was messing with my HDD. But uninstalling it (as well as disabling RST in BIOS) yielded no substantial improvement.
So now what's left for me to do is:
- Boot into Safe mode, see if issue prevails there
- Plug the SATA cable of the HDD into a different port, see if that changes anything
- Try a different hard drive (that I don't have right now so meh)
- reinstall Windows 10 (last resort, I'd rather avoid this)
I will update this post as I go, but I already wanted to take in some feedback in case someone already knows what's up, and maybe save me some time. Beyond the fact that the clicking is super annoying, I don't think the drive doing that this often does it any good...
I googled this issue extensively but couldn't really find any report that closely matched my current issue. I did find a similar thread on these forums though (Win10 pausing every 30 seconds on ASUS Laptop. Sleep mode issue too. - Windows 10 Forums), but unlike the OP I have no issues with sleep mode nor does my OS "pause" per se. I do notice some slight hiccups in Clicker Heroes when the spikes occur, but other stuff like Youtube videos seem unaffected.
So yeah. Long post, but I hope some good soul can help. That would be very much appreciated... I'd be glad to provide any info and logs if required.
--
Before posting I already have an update: Reviewing the Event Viewer now shows me a very large number of Event 225 warnings right before some of the many restarts of mine in the past few hours, e.g.
"The application \Device\HarddiskVolume5\Windows\System32\VSSVC.exe with process id 1528 stopped the removal or ejection for the device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C82&SUBSYS_79221462&REV_00\3&11583659&0&FA"
Hmm??
--
Edit1: in Safe Mode, the drive ran smoothly. Now I'm back on the unsafe side, eh. Doesn't click until I run Clicker Heroes. Don't tell me a Flash game that's on Steam is causing these issues... If it wasn't 2 AM I'd try to troubleshoot and uninstall any apps until I find the culprit... happy days ahead.
Last edited by Hisui; 10 Aug 2015 at 19:09.