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What's the cause of old hard drives "clicking" failure?

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First post, by tauro

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I've been messing around with old laptops and their hard drives. Some of them fail to start and make the "clicking" noise, but after some attempts they come back to life. I also noticed that tapping them on the side can help with this.

Not all old (<2GB) 2.5'' hard drives show this problem, but some do. It manifests after some time (days maybe) of inactivity. Once they "awake", the disks usually work fine and have 0 bad sectors. They continue to work fine for days but if I don't use them for some time, the problem appears again.

I'd like to understand what's the name of this failure, and why it happens. Typical disks that would show this problem are TOSHIBA, IBM, HITACHI.
It's as if after some time of inactivity they get lazy... Something is worn out, something gets stuck, I don't know but this is very common and I'd like to know what's going on.

Last edited by tauro on 2024-09-03, 15:17. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 6, by HomeLate

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Some hard drives use a rubber bumber to stop the head assembly. The rubber detoriates over time and becomes sticky and the head assembly is unable to move. This is also known as the 'sticky head' syndrome.

Sometimes, a gentle tap (aka percussive maintenance) will help the head become unstuck and the drive will work again. There's nothing much that can be done. Unless you open the drive, clean up the stick rubber and replace it with rubber washers.

Reply 2 of 6, by rasz_pl

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depends on the click. Some defective drives click by repeatedly slamming head into the parking area when unable to read firmware.

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Reply 3 of 6, by bakemono

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I have a 500MB Toshiba in my 486 laptop that has been doing this for several years. Some days it won't unstick on its own, and I have to take the HDD caddy out and throw it at the mattress a few times to get it loosened up 😀

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Reply 4 of 6, by tauro

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HomeLate wrote on 2024-09-03, 07:07:

Some hard drives use a rubber bumber to stop the head assembly. The rubber detoriates over time and becomes sticky and the head assembly is unable to move. This is also known as the 'sticky head' syndrome.

Thanks for that term!

It seems to be indeed the bumper stop degraded rubber preventing the actuator to move.

Here's an image:

The attachment degraded.bumper.rubber.jpg is no longer available

Source: https://youtu.be/aLpkNURdf3Q?&t=845

I'll inspect some of my hard drives to make sure and maybe solve the issue.

bakemono wrote on 2024-09-03, 13:41:

I have a 500MB Toshiba in my 486 laptop that has been doing this for several years. Some days it won't unstick on its own, and I have to take the HDD caddy out and throw it at the mattress a few times to get it loosened up 😀

Be careful because these disks can be unforgiving to fall damage. Just gently tap them on the side, close to where the actuator is (once the disk is off). I wouldn't do it too hard (I learned the hard way).

Reply 5 of 6, by tauro

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It turns out my disks don't have this decomposing rubber.

I opened one HITACHI and a couple of TOSHIBA disks from the "beyond repair" box.
They don't have this sticky rubber.

Instead, they have this plastic cylinder. It's definitely not sticky but it is brittle.

The attachment mk1924fcv.jpg is no longer available

So the mystery deepens...

Reply 6 of 6, by douglar

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I've run into situations when I got a clang/clang/clang noise from the drive when I connected a really old drive that only does CHS ( common before 1994) to a controller that only does LBA ( common after 2005 ).

The drives are often fine, even though they make some terrible sounds. They just need a controller that knows how to speak CHS and they sound normal again.

Sometimes I have to go into the BIOS and force CHS. Most USB -IDE adapters made after 2005 don't speak CHS anymore.

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