WARNING! DELLS Hard Drives

Well I am still not sure if my laptop falls into this category, but ill go on. I recieved my laptop on friday the 7th, and everything was fine. Saturday while im using my laptop i notice this noise that i never heard on friday. It was nothing bad or i dont think unusual but i just dont remember it being there. Anyways it sounds just like a click or a clack, only does it one time and probably once every minute. Its very small the only way you would hear it is if you were on your laptop with no sound in the room. I decided ill research this. I go to the Dell Forums, hard drive section and i Find a spam of posts maybe 100 out of the 245 posts talk about a clicking sound in their hard drive usually ending with the death of the hard drive. Now its not the same sound i am describing, they describe it as being very loud and untolerable and usually having more than one click continuously. As we all know Dell uses Hitachi hard drives, and after research i find that Hitachi drives are listed as number 5 of the worst hard drives ever, problem: head drive crash. That is the click. Now my click does not fall in this category, i have been writing this post for about 5 minutes now and i have not heard a single click which leads me to think it only happens when hard drive is idle. I ran the Diagnostic Cd that came with the laptop and hard drive came out fine, also ran scandisk and everything came out fine. Now at this point im not worried but my warrany will end in about 27 days if it is only a 30 day warranty...Im pretty worried. Im just finished downloading the hitachi Drive fitness TEst and im about to run it. Maybe i am just paranoid though, since this is my first laptop i have no one else to compare it to. If anyone else with an inspiron can shed some light about a click they get if the system is idle or even while you are doing something. Just a very small click just a bit louder than the regualr noise of your HD accessing stuff. Let me know this is normal. Just one click not intermittent ones. Go to google and type Dell Forums and see for yourself, read up on the hard drive section.

 

Maybe this is also the hard drive shutting down and powering back on after being idle, not sure, if anyone knows how to disable the drive shutting down after being idle let me know. Thanks

 

Well, I have a 60 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM drive, and I occasionally hear a soft click from my hard drive, but I've owned it since last July and have never had any problems with it. In fact, the clicks seemed a tiny bit louder than the 40 GB Hard Drive that came with my Inspiron (which also had some soft clicking noises)

That's my experience with Hitachi hard drives. I'm don't think there's any problems with our hard drives, so I wouldn't worry quite yet.

And if something did happen to the drive, it's covered under the standard 1 year warranty (or extended warranty if you purchase one)

 

How often do you hear this click though? I get it once every 30 seconds. Not loud and not intermittent like everyone on the dell forums describe having followed by failure. Anyways you say i have 1 year to replace the drive. Im so relieved, i was just thinking about calling tommorow to get them to send me one incase it goes out after 30 days.

 

I would say, if I notice the clicks, maybe once or twice every few mintues, but I wouldn't notice them unless I paid attention to it.

The clicks are defintely not loud. I think you'll be okay...all Dell laptop's have a one year standard warranty, and the hard drive is included in that warranty.

I really wouldn't worry too much at this point...just pay attention to any change in performance, errors, etc...

 

Well i guess im good, thanks.

 

On my old notebook, a Compaq 2800T, the HD made loud clicking sounds almost all the time. The computer could be completely idle with nothing open and it'd do it.

It might not be that you have a bad HD, you just may be hearing it seek. If it only does it with activity I'd guess it's that. If it were louder than you describe I might say send the HD back but since it's faint even in a quiet room that's probably normal sound coming from the platters spinning and the head seeking. Think of it like putting a CD in, it spins up every now and then to grab more data then slows down, it isn't a constant noise. Your HD only needs data now and then, most of it is offloaded into RAM.

 

Disable the indexing service, or better yet, uninstall it from the Add/Remove Windows Components (Control Panel/Add Remove)

Precision M60/15.4 WUXGA/1.7P-M/2GB@333/[email protected]/NV36GL + M10/4xDVD-RW+/GigaBit/DBay/DView/DPort/DDock/BlueTooth/SmartCard/WiFi a/b/g

 

Sometimes when the drive is sitting there spinning, but not reading/writing, it will may click once or a few times. This may sometimes happen because of thermal recalibration. Pulled this from a website:

What is Thermal Recalibration?

Some parts of the hard disk are vulnerable to heat - enough to affect size or shape temporarily. Because of this, a common hard disk has built in Thermal Recalibration - where the drive checks itself to confirm and readjust measurements between sectors and tracks.

I get this same clicking sound with my new Seagate 40GB 5400rpm drive & my older IBM drives as well (Hitachi makes the drives for IBM now) and they are all still working.

-Vb-

 

First: is your hard drive anywhere near full? If it is full and the head is crashing, you should have errors up the wazoo. Even if empty, it would destroy data left and right. I don't think the clicking is anything to worry about.

Here's a little advice a car mechanic gave me: If you hear a clicking noise, the best solution is to turn up the radio.

 

Hitachi has a utility on their web site that will allow you to turn off the advanced power saving features. It requires a floppy disc drive but that can be worked around for those that do not have one.

 

ya ive been trying to figure out how to use that utility since i downt have a floppy can anyone help?

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Truballa2k3