Acer Timeline 5820TG Hard Diak Issue

Hi all,

I recently purchased my new Aspire Timeline 5820TG running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. The hard disk is a Western Digital WD3200BEVT.

The notebook works fine, but I noticed two strange issues related to the Hard Disk. When the system is idle, I can hear a "click" noise every few seconds, and the Load Cycle Count (LCC) S.M.A.R.T. atribute increases by 1 on every "click". This does not happen when the hard disk is working. This could be related to the power saving mechanism that parks the heads after a very short period of inactivity (abount 5 - 10 seconds), but I'm not sure if this is normal or if denotes some hardware problems on the hard disk. As a quick-and-dirty solution I wrote a small program that runs in background and writes a variable 4KB block of data to a disk file every 3 seconds, and this dramatically reduces the occurrence of head park events without any impact on the system, but I'm not sure that this issue is normal for this model of Hard Disk. The notebook is still covered by warranty, but I don't want to send back it if this is not a REAL hardware problem. Did anyone experience the same problem? Any opinions?

The second issue is related to the G-sense Error Rate S.M.A.R.T. attribute. Running a disk monitor, I noticed that this value sometime increases, but the notebook is not subject to any shock (I keep it perfectly immobile on the desktop). After 3 weeks of usage (about 3-4 hours every day), the raw value is set to 10. Is this normal or it denotes a severe issue?

The HD apparently works very fine, no other errors. Running the Western Digital Diagnostic Tool specific for this Hard Disk model does not signal any error and the test is PASSED.

Thank you very much for your opinions.

Beste regards,
Massimo

 

Parking heads this often is normal for these WD drive (but causes problems for users sometimes). So far the best solution is to use Quiet HDD and disable APM (you have to make add it to autorun though).

 

Thank you for your help.

I downloaded QuietHDD from the suggested site, but it is blocked by Ad-Watch Live as Trojan.Crypt.XPACK.Gen

 

It's a well known app but I've downloaded it one again and run it via virustotal.
Here are the results- 10 out of 43 AVs see it as a trojan- only one of which is reputable (McAfee-and a name is a good explanation- Heuristic.BehavesLike.Win32.Backdoor.H)
It's up to you- this application is widely used by people with these WD drives- they tend to cause a lot of trouble especially for gamers (sudden game freezes)