Hard Drive: click, rattle, rattle, "beep"

Bought an Alienware M17x two months ago.

I have two 160g hard drives in striped RAID.

One of the hard drives goes click, rattle, rattle, "Beep" (yeah, the drive actually emits a real beep sound) quite frequently.

After doing some reading, it looks like the hard drive is gonna die. They identify as Toshiba drives (Toshiba bought IBM's infamous line of Deathstar drives, and it looks like they're still POS drives).

I do *not* want to send this machine back to Alienware to get it fixed. So we won't even go that route at all.

So...

Does anyone know how to get SMART codes off of a drive in these laptops? The BIOS will not allow you to activate SMART responses.

Thinking about backing up the RAID, taking one disk out, disabling RAID, then restore from the backup to the one drive. The problem is identifying the problem drive. Hard to do without SMART codes. Any hints?

If you buy a new Alienware stay away from the 160 gig drives. They are Toshiba pieces of junk.

 

try this should give the info you need free Active@ Hard Disk Monitor. SMART diagnostic & HDD health control software for Windows XP Vista 2003 Server 2008...

 

Thanks, man.

Hopefully it will work on RAID drives. Seagate tools couldn't do that.

 

my hard drive also gives me click, beep click click, beep sounds occasionally, and while its at it the entire system lags horribly. it's done it ever since I got it but it hasn't died yet and the 99% of the time when its not making that sound it works perfectly. using SMART it reports that the drive is perfectly healthy with no errors. so I really have no idea what is causing the sound or lag. I have a ST9320421ASG. at least it doesnt happen very often

 

I had this on my M9750 a few times and once on my M17x, Both the same model drives in RAID0 (Seagate 7200.4 320GB)

I found it only seems to do it a short while after i move the laptop abruptly.

 

Death make sure the freefall sensor is off..

 

Update:

Well, I bought an external 1 TB drive, and am backing the m17x up every night to it. Still haven't replaced the internal drive, but it is still click, rattle rattle, beeping a lot. Some times more often than others. This morning it's *really* at it. Around every two minutes or so.

It has also developed one more symptom: now it makes a little rattling sound quite often between it's click, rattle rattle beep fits.

Now that I'm backing it up every night, I'm just gonna wait it out and see how long til it finally fails completely. By then maybe SSD's will be cheap enough to actually consider as a replacement for the small RAID array in this machine.

If I get a chance, I'll try to make a .wav file of the sound it makes, and post it here. Be interesting to see exactly how many of us have machines doing this...

 

The saga continues...

The machine has failed to start a few times, due to it not being able to find a hard drive, and it has also shutdown by itself a few times, too.

But now for about the last month, the click rattle rattle beep has stopped. The drive appears to be working fine now. Possibly a bearing that just needed to be broken in? the machine is just a bit over seven months old now.

I'm still doing frequent backups, but I don't think I'll replace the drive until it completely dies, just to see how long it lasts.

Hard drive speed tests show rather discouraging results, as they have since the machine was new. I'm getting speeds equivalent of a single 4,500 rpm drive. You'd think a striped array would do better. Symptom of the drive struggling? Guess it could be, but it's been that way since new.

 

I know you don't want to send it in, but perhaps you could consider calling AW and requesting a techie. I won't lie to you, they will make you do all sorts of horrible testing that is all bull and completely un-related. Worth a shot though.

 

Hey FloorPizza your beeping noises doesnt happen to sound like this does it?

Beeping Noise.mp3 (at :30 and :59)

Mine has been making this noise since I had it as well I think its my hard drive going bad.

If the drives are what came with you Alienware why not just ask Dell to replace them tell them what you are going thru and im sure they will then restore using your backups?

 

If this can be helpfull to somebody, for data recovery from dead HDD i use R-studio. Doesn't cost too much and saved my data already twice (from external hdd failures), worth the money.

The clicks and beeps as stated from TheOne, shouldn't happend from a healty drive (it reminds me of one of my drives, when it failed the only audible sound was a cyclic "click, rattle, beep...click,rattle, beep..."

 

Mine sounds different than that one. Not as high pitched, and it's always accompanied by a clicking or rattle sound.

It's doing it again, and the machine will occasionally shut down from it, and the raid monitoring software will occasionally throw an error "read/write error from RAID Port 5 disk".

So it looks like it's on it's last legs.

I really don't want to ship my machine back to Dell; I'd rather work on it myself. So When this drive finally bites it, I'm just gonna put a couple of Samsung Spinpoint MP4 HM320HJ drives in it. NewEgg had them on sale for 40 bucks with free shipping, but of course I didn't find out about that til the sale was over. But they're still only 59 bucks and a buck shipping.

Looks like a pretty decent drive... 320 gig capacity, 7200 rpm, 16 cache. I've owned a bunch of Samsung drives over the years. Never had a problem with any of 'em, and they've always been fast/quiet.

I'm using Acronis Drive Image to back the machine up every two days. Also have a restore startup DVD made, so swapping out the drives will be cake. The backup volume is a eSata 1TB drive, so it's just a matter of starting from the recovery DVD, pointing to the 1TB backup drive, and clicking restore.

No sense in having my machine gone for several weeks just to have Dellienware install a couple more bad drives. Now if they'd ship me a decent pair of replacement drives, let me install them myself, then let me ship the bad ones back, that'd be great. Yeah, like *that* would happen. :/

 

Well, it's been throwing errors for a while now, and the startup screen shows "error detected". Just got a couple new 500gb drives to throw in it. Now to just find the disassembly thread

 

Easy, remove battery, remove bottom baseplate with name plate, than you can see the HDDs and it should look self expanitory from there. Just unscrew the drive caddies, remove caddies, unscrew drives from caddies, and replace the drives. Then re-image your system and you should be good to go. Just make sure you go into the BIOS and ensure the bios remains set to RAID 0. Then just create the RAID volume from the CTRL-I menu. Then when you restore your image you can select the Stripe setup.