Faulty drives, useless customer service.
This is the second drive I've had same issue. There's a persistent clicking during idle you can hear, and even feel if you put your hand on the case of your pc closest to the driver enclosure/mounting point. Happens every 3-4 seconds, and will not go away. I've tried everything that has been suggested, ran the SeaTools long test which stops the clicking for the 17 hour duration, but it comes back immediately afterwards. I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary, just trying to get this drive to be a decent mass storage for media in my PC. Connected to a power supply with wattage to spare, then a sata cable straight to my motherboard. Hell, I even have a regular 3TB barracuda drive that works perfectly and is silent. Worst part is when I decided to contact SeaGate customer service, I gave them the serial number of the drive, and received two different emails telling me it "is an internal component of the external hard drive" without explaining what that actually means in context of my issue. The second of the two emails then informed me that because of this fact, they aren't able to act on the warranty. Now let me tell you right now, this drive was sold directly from Amazon, and I'm aware some people do sketchy returns, but this came in sealed OEM packaging, it was unopened, was not formatted, had the right amount of space, and the label was pristine and untouched. So if there's any fault here in terms of it somehow being the wrong item, I'm willing to put that on Seagate. That said, so the five year warranty these drives come with? Try one weekend and Seagate is telling me they're not going to honor it. Faaaaaantastic. EDIT: I've received further clarification from Seagate that apparently the drive was never meant to be sold and was intended to be used inside a an external enclosure. This of course makes no sense as like I previously stated, the drive was factory sealed. Nevertheless, be forewarned, apparently, by Seagate's own words, you're not supposed to be buying these drives. If you have any issues with them, you better hope that they appear within the Amazon 30 day return window, because chances are Seagate's going to claim these were never meant to be sold and not honor your warranty. Read more