Seagate drive is clicking when it is active, but passes seatool test.

[bluesky]

Well, oneday the drive disappeared from Win7 explorer, but appeared after reboot. Then some time later it started to make pretty loud clicking sound constantly.
I backed up the data in the drive and disconnected and forgot about the drive.
I found the drive in the case and checked the warranty and found I still have almost 2 years.

Anyway, I downloaded Seatool and ran series of test on the program. It all passed, Smart, SDST, Short Generic and Long Generic. However the clicking sound is still there. Some reason it is less noisy and not clicking when the drive is not active(it was clicking ceaselessly before).
I still didn't run the advanced test on the program, but I doubt it can be fixed by running Seatool.

I am wondering this is enough reason to RMA the drive.
It seems Seagate is requiring a code from Seatool which is issued when it detects a failure from the tests.
Anyone has experience dealing with similiar issues?

 

[jdjbuffalo]

It certainly sounds like it's on the way to failure but not quite there yet.

My recommendation would be to try and make it fail. Write continuously to by copying over hundreds of GBs of data and see if it finally fails after a few days.

 

[ElFenix]

I still didn't run the advanced test on the program,

run the advanced test.

 

[bluesky]

It certainly sounds like it's on the way to failure but not quite there yet.

My recommendation would be to try and make it fail. Write continuously to by copying over hundreds of GBs of data and see if it finally fails after a few days.

Well, found the media files in the drive are freezing randomly, the incestant stop and go and keep clicking. Also it failed on Advanced test, full wipe of the drive.
By the way I only have two menus on the advanced test, Firmware update and full erase and both are not available or failed.

Looks like my only choice is to get a replacement drive from them.

 

[bluesky]

XXXX!
Accidently check teh boot drive during advaced testing, and it tried complete wipe on both drives.
I thought it was just aborted, but I couldn't start up Windows.
Found boot section and partition table are gone.
After long hours of work, managed to get important data back and reinstalled OS.
Well, what a crappy day it was!

 

[mfenn]

Whoops! I guess the lesson for next time is to make sure that you unplug all other HDDs when doing potentially dangerous low-level operations.