Acer 1810TZ (1410TZ) MODDED, questions, help!

Hi guys , I recently bought a wonderful netbook Acer Aspire Timeline 1810TZ or called 1410TZ in americas , im very pleased with the purchase!
Anyhow i upgraded the ram from a 3gb ddr2 667mhz to a 4gb kingston ddr2 800mhz (since the bus is at 800mhz i guess it would run better) , and from a 250gb 5400rpm hd to a 500gb 7200rpm seagate momentus with g-shock protection, one of the best available on the market.

Ok it's few days that im hearing a strange clicking sound with the hard drive, sometimes , it doesnt necessarily happens often , just randomly . It seems it's loading then suddenly stop, click , and continue...
i did a bit of research and i found out that it could be indeed a bad secctor problem .... strange since the harddrive is brand new ... what do you think ?

how do you advise me to proceed ? is there any test i can rely on to find out if my hd is braking down or has any problem ? my hd is partitioned in 2 , c and d , i was wondering , chkdsk could work , or better to get a dos test or something like that ? ... let me know please

thanks a lot if you can help

 

nosham,

back in February or April of this year, I bought and returned 4 Seagate 7200.4's. I thought they were all broken by the way they worked - very slow, like molasses - 1 1/2 Hrs to install Vista on one of them, the other two DOA, the forth one, Vista seemed to install properly, but I was hit with error after error once install finished. I returned them all and bought a Scorpio Blue 500GB which, not only was much faster than the Seagates (and the Blue is only a 5400 RPM drive), but it was also an improvement over my Hitachi 7K200 which up till then was my notebook HD 'standard'.

Currently, I'm waiting delivery for a Hitachi 7K500 and to give you a hint of its potential, see posts 198 & 199 here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=431402&page=20

To buy this drive see here:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145275

(Currently says deactivated - Newegg says that when they have no stock in).

My advice?

Return the Seagate if you can, or, RMA it and sell the replacement drive offered - either way, you don't want that drive in your system.

Buy the Hitachi, when stock comes back, currently the best mechanical HD for notebook's.

Good luck.

 

thanks a lot for your advice man ,
actually i thought the momentus 7200 with gshock protection was the best drive available... i remember the seagate barracuda was one of the hottest sale some time ago...

however i now changed some POWER MANAGEMENT settings in windows 7 and it SEEMS that the tedious click has decreased its frequency of appearance ...
it now clicks every now and then...

i understnad that i also dont want a potentially dangerous drive mounted in my machine ! do you think it can really crash at anytime ?

unfortunately im in italy in this moment and i cant really find a shop that sells that hitachi... i only saw a place that sells it for almost 200 euros (250 or more us dollars , and it's even out of stock ! probably need to wait 1 or 2 weeks ...)

thanks for your time