HDDs have heads and clicking noises coming from it is either the drive moving these heads, parking or unparking them. Apparently there are models which do this when they're being queried for their SMART attribute values or ATA Statistics. I've never seen this in my personal experience, but I only buy WD drives, so...
Is it normal behavior for drives to be doing that? I don't know. In my opinion, all a drive should do when the drive is queried for those values, is maybe unpark the heads and then park them again after some time - but more or less quietly, and definitely without thrashing the drive. Usually, the drive should be able to answer back to the software without (un)parking the heads. Because remember that SMART has been existing for decades, and you'd think that manufacturers had enough time to figure this out.
What you could do is this: Get smartmontools (smartctl specifically) and query the drive with that tool. If it behaves the same way, then it's "normal" for the drive to be doing such things. As normal as its firmware allows, anyway. Many Linux Live systems have this tool available, but there's also a Windows port available. Querying the drive might be unusual for users who are not familiar with Linux systems. For the first drive use
, the second drive is named /dev/sdb, the third is /dev/sdc and so on. Remember to run this command on an elevated CMD.
Regards
Dalai
Is it normal behavior for drives to be doing that? I don't know. In my opinion, all a drive should do when the drive is queried for those values, is maybe unpark the heads and then park them again after some time - but more or less quietly, and definitely without thrashing the drive. Usually, the drive should be able to answer back to the software without (un)parking the heads. Because remember that SMART has been existing for decades, and you'd think that manufacturers had enough time to figure this out.
What you could do is this: Get smartmontools (smartctl specifically) and query the drive with that tool. If it behaves the same way, then it's "normal" for the drive to be doing such things. As normal as its firmware allows, anyway. Many Linux Live systems have this tool available, but there's also a Windows port available. Querying the drive might be unusual for users who are not familiar with Linux systems. For the first drive use
Code:
smartctl -Ai /dev/sda
Regards
Dalai