instead of magnet, what i used to do with ticking / corrupted drives was write full of 0, then write full of 1, then full of 0, repeat a few times. it takes frigging agents, but it kind of gets out all of the bumps in the magnetic material and smoothens it out again. fixed many broken drives doing that. ticking is often the read head getting dumped too much due to magnetic substance on the disk being piled up too much giving too much of a push to it. then the ticking will cause similar piles to form and get worse and worse.
Alternative explanation: some sectors are unreadable due to checksum errors (caused by improper powerdown). Repeated read requests sounds like ticking because the head will be seeked every time.
Writing all 1's or 0's to the drive causes those sectors to either be rewritten or reallocated.
The fact it's 1's and 0's wouldn't have an impact anyway - all drives use data whitening techniques anyway.
