I have two 9 GB SCSI hard drives in my very low volume web server. (We need to put some larger ones in soon but they're good enough for now.) Since the day we setup this server, back in 2003, the hard have noticably clicked. The clicking has been randomish every few seconds other than when installing software, copying files or similar activity where you'd expect a lot of hard drive acivity. I always thought this was because of all the random activity of being hit every few seconds from the Internet. And the logging of web pages hit, etc.
However for 16 hours it was down because of misconfiguration by the ISP and the hard drives still clicked. Is this normal behaviour?
One is a Seagate ST39102LW and the other a Quantum Atlas IV 9 WLS. I installed the Seagate tools and both failed the short drive test. But I wonder if those hard drives are so old the tool doesn't deal with them properly?
The IDE hard drive we installed as a backup/archive hard drive happily passed the Seagate short DST