Why does the hard drive tick every 2 seconds

[AndersJ]

HP workstation running Windows 7 professional,  fresh install.
When all booting is done, and it does nothing,
the drive ticks audibly every 2 seconds.
The drive activity led blinks synchronously.

Thinking it was a swapping issue, I doubled the RAM.
No change.

What might cause this?

[bitseeker]

It could be any number of things, most are related to Windows or apps doing stuff in the background (every version seems to do more and more stuff "silently" ). Check the various system and user logs to see if there's anything unusual going on.

On Windows 10, for example, I discovered that the included Skype Metro/Modern app was constantly starting up and crashing (even though I never used the thing), which resulted in recurring writes to the system error log. Thousands and thousands of log entries every day! Suffice it to say, I uninstalled the stupid software, which greatly reduced the writing, but there's still stuff going on. More hunting and killing to do.

Also, check applications that may be auto-saving your work, browsers auto-saving your session, etc. The Resource Monitor can be helpful to see what's generating a lot of data throughput to/from the drives.

[AndersJ]

It sounds OK while booting and working normally.
I do not how it sounded previously.

[tautech]

Have you had any experience of Win 7 before?
It does a lot of stuff in the background including Defrag so I wouldn't panic for at least a few hours....depending on the priority set for Defrag, normally quite low so it doesn't impact on system performance.

[nowlan]

Get some SMART diag tool, to see if any errors reported by drive etc.

[Jeroen3]

A loud tick is made by a movement error of the head. Or a head unload.
Both should not happen at constant interval.

1. Backups.
2. Read smart data. (HD sentinel for example)
3. Checkdisk -f -r. (That's with free space)

Still there?
New disk, ssd perhaps?

[eugenenine]

Sysinternals used to have a nice utility that would log activity so you could look for repeat entries.

Remember windows wants to swap though no matter how much ram you have.  The reg key that let you control that was one item they dropped from windows 2000 to xp.

[jtstowell]

This sounded familiar, so I did some searching of my notes. It may be advanced power management on the drive, causing it to spin down when it is "idle." If it does this a lot, it can cause excessive wear as it constantly parks and unparks the drive.

You mentioned that this is a fresh install. I wonder if there was a setting somewhere (perhaps put there by the OEM) causing APM to be less aggressive in the previous install of Windows.

To fix this the last time I encountered it, I used a utility named hdparm for Linux to manage the APM settings for the drive. It appears that some kind soul has ported this utility to Windows. I can't vouch for it, and you'll need to do your own research, but the URL I found with a little googling is:

http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/2011/12/disabling-hard-disk-drive-advanced.html

Hope this is helpful,

Tom

[AndersJ]

Thanks Tom, for an excellent suggestion!!!
This worked, almost.

While the console is open after doing its work, the ticking goes away.
A few seconds later it prompts for any key to close the DOS-box.
The ticking now unfortunately returns, regardless of whether I close the console or not.

This indicates however that this is indeed a APM issue,
which is a great step forward,
but the tool doesn't resolve it as I hoped it would.

And if it did,
it seems this procedure needs to be repeated after every boot,
which is a disappointment.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong?

[bitseeker]

Different drives have different support for APM settings and commands. On some, you can just disable spindown. On others, you may have to adjust the timeout to be very long. There should be a way to save the settings between starts. I had to do this for a 24x7 file server at home. The drive kept going to sleep and interfering with writes. By default, any changes were lost on reboot; a command had to be sent to the drive to save them.

[Bobson]

If your HDD is made by Western Digital, than it could be idle settings problem. Google for "wdidle3.exe".

[Kilrah]

What kind of "tick"? Same one as when you trigger an operation yourself, or louder one? Regular accesses are pretty normal.

Remember windows wants to swap though no matter how much ram you have

Unless you disable swap altogether.

[AndersJ]

Its the head parking tick.

[3db]

Are you sure it's the hard drive ?
Windows makes clicking noises  for example when you're browsing the web.

[wasyoungonce]

Its the head parking tick.

Give the man a candy.   Yep head parking mech!  Why it's parking...could be many reasons suffice to say...it's doomed.

[bitseeker]

Why it's parking...could be many reasons suffice to say...it's doomed.

Hire a new valet.