Clicking sound with Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB

It has been about a month thought I would provide an update, perhaps those searching the forum about these drives (like I was some months back) might be helped from my experience. I swapped out the clicking drive with the extra drive I had purchased, Seagate eventually sent me a refurbished drive in replacement of the RMA’d drive (which has now become my spare). Have had no further clicking issues, as I mentioned before I am impressed with how much cooler and quieter the NV+ is running. Also, the slower disk speed on the sparc processor has not been all that noticeable to any of us, even when we are pushing it. Overall, given the limited 2TB disks on the HCL to choose from, I am please with these drives. Originally, I did not want to go with these ‘Green’ drives, especially considering their early track record; I nearly purchased Seagate Enterprise 2TB drives not on the HCL and was going to roll the dice, but PapaBear wisely steered me back to the trusted and well tested HCL.

That all having been said, there is one noticeable performance drawback I have been experiencing that did not occur with the 750GB Seagate drives my NV+ came with and ran flawlessly for years. When these ST32000542AS drives are not accessed for a given period of time, it seems as if these drives go into some form of a sleep or modified shutdown mode, which becomes noticeable when any of the networked systems (wired or wireless) tries to access the drives, there is a delay before the requested data appears, even though it is in seconds, it is noticeable and never occurred with the previous Seagate drives. My NV+ is always on and I do not use disk spin down, FW 4.1.7 [1.00a043], X-RAID. Audibly, during this latency period, you can hear that the disks are already spinning, although the drives go from quiet spinning to the brief sound of drive head activity ramping up simultaneously on all four drives in a far more chaotic way then even when reading or writing large amounts of data. Another related issue during this period of not accessing the NV+, is the networked computers (both Vista and Window7) which have mapped drives to the NV+, will visually show the drive disconnected/red-x’d. However, as soon as you open the drive or launch an application which accesses the drive, there is a delay, and then everything comes right up as is should. This never occurred with the previous Seagate drives. When I was researching the clicking noise, I did read some discussions about these ST32000542AS and how they park the heads when the drives are not accessed and how it was causing various issues, especially with RIAD controllers. However, I had understood the Seagate FW upgrade to have corrected this, even the Seagate Technician I spoke with and asked did not indicate any issue in a RAID and certainly Netgear endorses these drives and has not posted anything to the contrary, I am sure they would have experience these issues in their extensive testing. As I said before, there is so much out there about these drives, much of which contradicts itself, it is hard to know what is factual, which is why I thought I would share my experience. Hope it helps.