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    M1530 hard drive constantly spinning up and down - whirr noises; causing damage to HDD?

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by dt_, Nov 20, 2008.

  1. dt_

    dt_ Notebook Guru

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    Hello,

    I am having an annoying and possibly troublesome problem with my laptop’s hard disk drive that’s been going on , as far as I can tell, for a couple of days now.

    Recently I have noticed that sometimes – not always, but sometimes – my hard drive will spin down – that is, it will emit a whirr that decreases in pitch until it stops – then pauses for a couple of seconds, and then spins back up again. Then I hear the HDD clicking like it’s reading/writing normally from the drive. During that brief interval, it seems like some activity on my computer stops working. And then the computer / HDD stay running for a while, usually like 30-60 seconds, normally. And then the process repeats itself! The HDD just spins down, pauses for a couple seconds, and then spins up again. I’m worried that this could be causing long-term damage to my HDD.

    Strange thing is, I’ve only noticed this since my experiment with Ubuntu a couple of days ago. I had installed Ubuntu 8.10 on a partition of my HDD. Because I am running on a laptop and I was in pursuit of getting some better battery life I decided to apply some scripts in the terminal from some posts on ubuntuforums.org that are supposed to help reduce battery life by reducing the load on the hard drive or something. I’m not quite sure what I did; I do remember some “HDPARM” messages however.

    Anyway, I didn’t save these in any startup scripts; I just ran them in the terminal so I wouldn’t think these changes would stick. But it seems like they have! Either I’m just paranoid, or these changes have become permanent somehow. Which doesn’t make sense, because I’ve since removed Ubuntu from my hard drive entirely and I’m using exclusively Windows Vista now.

    Can anyone help me figure out what’s causing this and how I might resolve it? Could it really cause damage to my HDD? Even if not, it’s quite annoying if I’m working in a fairly quiet environment because I can hear the drive spinning up and spinning down pretty frequently. Could it have something to do with the “page file”? (I’m not quite sure what that is, to be honest. But maybe it has something to do with why my HDD is seemingly getting accessed quite frequently?)

    My machine is a Dell XPS M1530 laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium and 3 GB of RAM and a 250 GB HDD (I think it’s a Samsung HDD).

    Any input would be greatly appreciated. :/

    Thanks!

    dt
     
    dt_, Nov 20, 2008
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  2. dt_

    dt_ Notebook Guru

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    bump .. anyone? :/
     
    dt_, Nov 21, 2008
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