Seagate drive clicking noise and what to do about it

Seagate drives seem to have a much-discussed issue with the power management modes in hard drives that causes the heads to park and unpark unnecessarily, which causes an audible clicking and additional wear and tear on the unload ramp. While hard drives are typically rated to 10,000-20,000 load/unload cycles, this power management bug causes the drive to load and unload unnecessarily when the drive is idle, causing the load/unload count to increase rapidly and unnecessarily.

The best way to quiet an affected drive is to change the hard drive’s APM setting.

For linux users, the command hdparm will change the drives APM setting, but must be run at every boot-up.

The command would be sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda (assuming your drive is at /dev/sda)

For windows users, there’s two options. One is a windows port of the linux program hdparm. Use the same syntax as above.

The second, and easier to use option is the program QuietHDD.

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