clicking · ticking · beeping · spin-up, spin-down · SAS 10K · 15K · helium
A drive that clicks has heads that cannot find the servo tracks: they sweep, fail, park and try again, and each sweep drags a head that may already have failed across a platter that may already be scored. A drive that spins up, hunts and spins down again has a service area, the drive's own firmware on the platters, that its heads cannot read, or a motor that cannot hold speed. On a 10K or 15K SAS drive with more heads flying closer than any desktop drive's, the damage from a night of trying is real; on a helium drive it is the same damage in a case that cannot be opened twice. The set around it has a decision to make too, because a clicking member is a member the controller has already dropped, and the rebuild onto its replacement reads the survivors. One clicking member imaged after a head swap is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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A hard drive's heads read their position from servo information written between the data on every track. At power-on the heads unpark, fly over the platters and look for it; a head that has failed reads nothing, the drive sweeps the whole stack back to the crash stop, parks, and tries again, and that is the click. On a desktop drive there are two to eight heads; on a 15K 2.5-inch SAS drive there are more, flying lower, on platters spinning twice as fast. A failed head dragged across a platter at that speed scores it, and a scored platter is data that no donor can bring back.
A drive that spins up, hesitates and spins down is usually failing to read its service area, the reserved tracks where the firmware's own data lives: the translator, the defect lists, the adaptive parameters for each head. Without them the drive cannot come ready, and it gives up and spins down. Sometimes a head is the reason; sometimes the service area's data is corrupt; sometimes the motor cannot hold speed. All three are bench jobs, and none of them improves with a fifth attempt.
The set has already reacted. A RAID controller dropped the clicking drive the moment it stopped answering, and the set is degraded and serving from the survivors. If a replacement was fitted, a rebuild is reading every sector of every survivor, and the survivors are the same age as the drive that just failed. That is the other half of this page: the clicking drive is imaged after a head swap, and the set is checked for its next weakest member before anything rebuilds.
| What you see | The usual reason | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Clicking, regular | Failed head or heads | Matched head stack; imaged head by head |
| Clicking, then silence | Heads parked after repeated failure | As above; power down |
| Beeping (2.5-inch) | Heads stuck to the platter | Freed on the clean bench; heads usually replaced |
| Spins up and down | Service area unreadable, or motor | Service area repaired or heads swapped; motor freed |
| Clicking helium drive | Failed heads in a sealed case | Opened once; imaged immediately |
| Clicking and a rebuild running | Set reading its survivors | Power down; assess the survivors first |
A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
A clicking drive goes to the clean bench without being powered again. Its heads are inspected, a matched donor stack fitted, and the service area checked for damage from the failed heads' last flights; a drive that spins up and down has its service area read and repaired first. Only then is the drive imaged, head by head, with the weakest last.
Every drive is imaged sector by sector, head by head where it needs it, with the bad areas last. Drives with 520- or 528-byte sectors are imaged as they are and the extra bytes stripped from the image, never the drive. Self-encrypting drives are unlocked on the imager with the key you supply. From then on the originals are not touched again.
Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
Two heads had failed. The drive had a matched head stack fitted on the clean bench and was imaged on the SAS imager head by head; the predictive drive was imaged too. Both images went back on fresh drives and the set rebuilt cleanly from members that answered every read.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseUsually. The heads are replaced with a matched donor stack on the clean bench and the drive imaged head by head. Every power-on before it reaches the bench lowers the odds.
No. Each attempt sweeps a failed head across the platter. What you heard is enough.
The case is opened once and the drive imaged immediately afterwards, because the heads fly badly in air. It is recoverable; it is not recoverable twice.
£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing, head swap included.
3–4 days at the bench, or longer where a donor must be found, and the figure says which.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.