one of my 4 internal HD's is clicking....How to tell which one?

[Gomff]

Hi everyone.
Title says it all really. Whilst using my MP these days, one of my hard drives makes a worrying clicking sound. I don't have power saving switched on for any of my drives and so they're always powered up.....This sound is a new thing that has started happening in the last couple of days.

So does anyone have any idea how I tell which one it is? there's no way I can backup absolutely everything on my machine right now, although my main system drive and work files are covered.

Thanks for any help

 

[QuarterSwede]

That's definitely a sign of a possible dying hard drive. Have you tried putting your ear up to each one? I'm not sure that's even possible with the MP.

 

[Gomff]

Sorry, I should mention that the clicking sound happens about once every half hour or so most of the time, but goes through phases of occurring more regularly. For this reason, it's harder to diagnose which drive it actually is.

 

[derbothaus]

Launch /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app and from there you can spin down and unmount the HD's. It will also list which bay the drive is in. Obviously you wont be able to unmount the boot drive, just make sure you do not have any files open on the HD's you unmount. If the clicking is constant you'll be able to tell through elimination.

 

[savpan]

Stress all the disks with a benchmark software or with copy-paste. Then keep touching them until you feel the disk that kicks.

I did this on a fileserver RAID and found the disk with the problem!

 

[Gomff]

Thanks for the suggestions...I'll give them a shot