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    Hard drive clicking

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by onlycurious, Jan 7, 2008.

  1. onlycurious

    onlycurious Notebook Consultant

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    Is it normal for a hard drive to click? I get it about every 10-15 minutes.
    The clicks also vary in sound. It's just a click, or click-click, or click-click-click.

    I've never experienced this noise with my e1705 or any other desktop hard drives.
     
    onlycurious, Jan 7, 2008
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  2. JoeNewberry

    JoeNewberry Notebook Evangelist

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    Clicking is normally bad. In my personal experience, it's usually a sign the drive is on its way to a physical failure. My advice would be to back-up your data and be prepared for the worst. Here is a quick article on the subject, there are quite a few more out there that can be found with a quick Google search: Hard Drive Makes a Clicking Sound
     
    JoeNewberry, Jan 8, 2008
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  3. nizzy1115

    nizzy1115 Notebook Prophet

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    search the site! gah, this is posted like 10 times a day. its called the hard drives head parking, and its normal and fine.
     
    nizzy1115, Jan 8, 2008
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  4. tehblizz

    tehblizz Notebook Geek

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    normal and fine, my vostro 1500 hd was doing it to.. Install NotebookHardwareControl and set the HD to max. performance and the clicking will stop! it's a power management tool, it's annoying but it saves you some battery time ;)
     
    tehblizz, Jan 8, 2008
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  5. star882

    star882 Notebook Evangelist

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    Use "hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" to disable hard drive power management.
    It is recommended to put it in one of your init scripts as frequent unloading wears out the drive faster.

    Use "smartctl -a /dev/sda" to check the SMART logs.
     
    star882, Jan 8, 2008
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  6. onlycurious

    onlycurious Notebook Consultant

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    Where do you put this?
     
    onlycurious, Jan 9, 2008
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  7. imar3l

    imar3l Notebook Evangelist

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    i had similar issue on my desktop, i let it defrag using diskeeper and it was reduced significantly.
     
    imar3l, Jan 9, 2008
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  8. PJ@y-Z

    PJ@y-Z Notebook Evangelist

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    Me too ;)
    There's also a setting for HDD in the bios: Bypass/Performance/Quiet
    What's it ?
     
    PJ@y-Z, Jan 9, 2008
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  9. deadsimple

    deadsimple Notebook Consultant

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    Everyone, please ignore this stupid Linux-only advice. star882 is consistently too thick to understand and accept that over 95% of laptop/computer users have Windows installed and won't benefit from a Linux solution. It's even worse when that's given as "the solution" without a disclaimer that it will only work under Linux.

    The working solution is in the first post of this thread:

    http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425

    (Disclaimer #1: I use Linux myself, not bashing the OS in any way)
    (Disclaimer #2: smartctl for Windows has no -B option and very limited functionality)
     
    deadsimple, Jan 9, 2008
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  10. star882

    star882 Notebook Evangelist

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    "smartctl" does not have a -B option on Linux either. The "-B" is for hdparm.

    And I don't know for sure but I think those commands also work on FreeBSD.
     
    star882, Jan 9, 2008
    #10