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PC Hangs when I hear a ticking sound

FewFlyBy

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Hello, so I have these ticking sound and can't find it in my cpu but I recorded the sound so that someone can help me if it sounds so familiar. This is the link of the sound Thank you!


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+1 to hdd disconnect it and try again.
 
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OneMoar

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hard drive about ready to die
backup any critical data and replace the drive ASAP
 
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Yep sounds like a Seagate in its death throes...
 
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Yeah, you won't find a ticking noise in your Central Processing Unit, because they don't have moving parts in the processor.
Like others have said, it sounds like the hard drive in your computer.
 
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While you are at it - replace the HDD with an SSD and drop your OS install on there. No matter what other HDD you put your data on, that way you will prevent the issue from ever causing your PC to hang again.

And it results in a much more responsive system overall.

Pick up a 128gb Crucial MX100 or 256gb if you feel like putting other stuff like games on it as well. Great value for money.
 

FewFlyBy

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Thank you everyone! I have 3 HDD's for now and the latest HDD came from my old laptop. Maybe it is the one causing it because it's the latest HDD I installed. I don't know how to check if it is the one causing it because I've tried removing it and sometimes the sound is still present. I benchmarked all HDD's using HD Tune Pro and here are the results:

My HD with the installed OS:
main.png

Another HD:
samsung.png

Newly installed HD (Came from my old laptop):
hitachi.png
 
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It can be also one of your another two hard drives that started failing, i'll try with just one HD connected per time, and see if you can hear the sound ... then you could isolate what HD is failing or if it wasn't coming from there, but my guess is the same as the others, failing HDD, you just have to realize which one.

Good luck :toast:
 

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I am betting on the boot-drive being the one at fault usually a secondary drive having a momentary hang won't be enough to cause a system crash
 
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I am betting on the boot-drive being the one at fault usually a secondary drive having a momentary hang won't be enough to cause a system crash

Yeah, my bet would be for the same one as you say, but maybe he has some programs/data that are constantly used by the OS in the other drives that could affect as well, I was just saying that to isolate the HD problem and to determine which one, but definitely I'll leave just the currently-OS-installed one connected for the first test :toast:
 
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Yes non OS drives dont cause PC freezes, you just cant access the data on it
 
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Yes non OS drives dont cause PC freezes, you just cant access the data on it

Not wanting to open a discussion here, but I had freezes/other problems due to faulty HD's not being the OS one due to they wanted to access data from that HD, and sometimes it's not "they can't access the data" ... sometimes the data they get is corrupted and can produce a hardware error as well. At least, it's what I can tell from my experience. Also I must say that this happened to me more than 10 years ago and I didn't had any other HD problem along this time, hope it continues as this.
 

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Thank you everyone! I have 3 HDD's for now and the latest HDD came from my old laptop. Maybe it is the one causing it because it's the latest HDD I installed. I don't know how to check if it is the one causing it because I've tried removing it and sometimes the sound is still present

A Ghetto method of Diagnosing which of your Many hard drives is Noisy and probably failing is
With an open case and the system powered on place a screwdriver (handle end) to your ear touch the other (blade end) to the Body of the hard drive listen
repeat for each hard drive.
the one making the worst noise is probably the one failing
 
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Not wanting to open a discussion here, but I had freezes/other problems due to faulty HD's not being the OS one due to they wanted to access data from that HD, and sometimes it's not "they can't access the data" ... sometimes the data they get is corrupted and can produce a hardware error as well. At least, it's what I can tell from my experience. Also I must say that this happened to me more than 10 years ago and I didn't had any other HD problem along this time, hope it continues as this.

Oh certainly I've had it as well in the past, but I have also had a faulty HDD in my Windows 7 machine (this current one) with the exact same symptoms as OP, and not once did it result in freezes, hiccups or reboots, and that is with the OS disk being an SSD and over 1 full year of using the faulty HDD.

I would imagine if the HDD was your cache disk it could hang. But in Win7, most if not all non-essential hardware errors just result in a popup and them getting turned off in system agent.

Surely there are going to be some edge cases where it could happen but with W7's kernel it is pretty hard.
 

FewFlyBy

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A Ghetto method of Diagnosing which of your Many hard drives is Noisy and probably failing is
With an open case and the system powered on place a screwdriver (handle end) to your ear touch the other (blade end) to the Body of the hard drive listen
repeat for each hard drive.
the one making the worst noise is probably the one failing
I'll try this one. Thanks

Sometimes the sound is not present and it functions pretty well. After some days it comes back..
 
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loading that link in the OP just loaded pages of ads for me, so it has been removed. feel free to use an ad-free file host instead.
 
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Grab the windows installer version of gsmartcontrol here,

http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net/home/index.php/Downloads

You should be easily able to tell which drive is starting to fail, click on a drive, then attributes tab. Usually the failing drive with have a reallocated sector count above 0, and also crc error count above 0. (btw, when something says 'pre-failure/old age' that this can also apply to new drives, so you can ignore that info.
 
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Grab the windows installer version of viruses here,
Fixed it for you.
Sourceforge seems to have a few bugs now, can't say I fully trust them as a download source.
 

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Fixed it for you.
Sourceforge seems to have a few bugs now, can't say I fully trust them as a download source.
SF is fine. If you're talking about software that includes adware in it, you can blame the software devs of that project for it. SF has been fine and hasn't caused any issues except for people who aren't more careful with installers. Lets stay on topic. ;)

I personally like GSmartControl as it can read through my RAIDs. There aren't any other SMART tools that provide as much control over SMART data than the smartctl CLI tool which I'm pretty sure GSmartControl uses under the hood.
 

FewFlyBy

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SF is fine. If you're talking about software that includes adware in it, you can blame the software devs of that project for it. SF has been fine and hasn't caused any issues except for people who aren't more careful with installers. Lets stay on topic. ;)

I personally like GSmartControl as it can read through my RAIDs. There aren't any other SMART tools that provide as much control over SMART data than the smartctl CLI tool which I'm pretty sure GSmartControl uses under the hood.
Hello, how to properly use GSmartControl?

I checked all of my drives using GSmartControl and saw this one on my Hitachi drive..

Untitled.png
 
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I checked all of my drives using GSmartControl and saw this one on my Hitachi drive..

View attachment 63850
One reallocated sector is okay. You run into problems when that number starts growing quickly. Anything over 10 in my book is a cause for concern, but 1 isn't anything to worry about. Occasionally drives will simply have a bad block that can't be used. It happens.

I do notice that the start-stop counter exceeds the power-on time. You should try disabling HDD power saving so the drives don't spin down. If they're spinning up and down often, you may fry the motor and if they're spun down and you need to access something, it needs to spin back up again before anything can happen. A great example are my WD Blacks. They can take as long as 8 or 9 seconds to fully spin up to speed, so it only makes sense to keep them spinning as opposed to having to wait almost 10 seconds just to access the drives.
 
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