On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 13:41, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2010/10/9 Fatih Tümen <fthtmn+gen...@gmail.com>: >> Hi, >> >> When I ran eix hdf command, all of a sudden my usb drive started >> making weird noises. I only have ccache, distfiles and packaes >> directories on sda2, the usb disk partition. I don't know why eix >> waked up the disk. Eix hung there non-responding for a moment as the >> disk kept making noises, so I interrupted the task. Immediately >> checked the logs[0] and umounted the device as a reflex. > > Hi, > > I recently had USB external hdd that started to make clicking noises > and beeping sounds and I couldn't access it at all anymore. I thought > "oh no, click of death"... but I also noticed very faint high-pitch > sound coming from the power supply. I contacted the hdd manufacturer > and they sent me a new power supply for free. Everything worked > perfectly after replacing it. > > In the past, with the same drive in fact, I also had problem with the > USB link dropping, which was causing disk corruption. I tried a > different USB cable but same problem persisted. Who knows if this was > also caused by the bad power supply, or USB hub overload on my > computer. I had about 10 USB devices attached at the time. I removed > some and moved around to spread the load out a bit and it worked fine > after that. > > Since replacing the power supply, I've used the same hdd with 2 other > computers and haven't have any issues so far. >
Also had PSU problems with external drives a while ago, I asked a friend to modidy a full ATX computer PSU for me so it could power two drives, never had problems again (the psu that comes with those things is just too cheap, tend to overheat and fail a lot). I never use 2.5 HDD USB enclosures for constant workload with no cooling at all (most cases for 2.5 drives have no cooler and rely on heat transfer from an aluminum body, wich is simply unreliable). On the other hand, I had a new, cooled 3.5 HDD fail on me after two days operation. It was promptly replaced by Seagate. The dread click of death... Of course I tested it on a SATA controller before calling it dead. Funny story. I had one drive that failed once (clicking) and I read somewhere to "cool" it. So I put the damn thing on the refrigerator, took it out after a while (it was so cold!), plugged in, and what the heck, it started working again and I was able to backup all of the data. After that it worked for a long time before failing again, lol. Now I always "cool" a clicking drive before replacing it. True story. -- Daniel da Veiga
