Hard Drive is pining for the Fjords

[lumberjim]

I don't think that is wise. I probably should not have opened it to see inside in a non sterile environment. i didnt touch it. just looked to see what it was doing. i thought that the arm was getting stuck on something..... it may be, but i cant see any obstruction. it may be under the disc.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

I don't think that is wise. I probably should not have opened it to see inside in a non sterile environment. i didnt touch it. just looked to see what it was doing. i thought that the arm was getting stuck on something..... it may be, but i cant see any obstruction. it may be under the disc.

Correct.

It's actually quite amazing how close to the surface of the disks the heads fly without touching. To put it into perspective, a modern hard disk has a floating height of an amazing 0.5 microinches. A human hair has a thickness of over 2,000 microinches! You can see why keeping dirt out of the hard disk is so important! In fact, the floating height of a hard disk is smaller than the circuit size of a microprocessor. What's even more amazing is how much abuse these hard disks can take when they are placed in laptop PCs, for example, given these facts, and how many people take this technology for granted every day...

The clicking you heard was probably the heads seeking the start position, failing, retrying, repeat, repeat, etc.