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

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

 

Back-up all your important data.

Some HD's die slow deaths and yours seems like it might be ready to go.

Run a disk error check!

If your HDD is damaged it is not because of those abnormal noises, the damage is causing the abnormal noises!

 

this is a known issue- i would do a couple searches on it;
http://linux-digest.blogspot.com/2007/10/ubuntu-hard-disk-loadunload-bug.html

it is caused by overly aggressive hard drive power savings settings. i had a similar problem;
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4090682

my hard drive was spinning up/down and loading/unloading the heads like crazy. i installed the hitiachi power booster program to set the hard drive power savings off (maximum performance). maybe samsung has a program to do this as well, not sure.

note that the settings are reset every time you reboot. so i have to change the setting every time i cold boot (see my other post, link above, for a better discussion of this stuff).

look in your bios and see if you have anything about hard drive power savings. lenovo bios doesn't. sucks.

 

How can I run a proper test to check the health of the hdd? :/

 

download hdtune, and go into the health tab.
If anything in the chart is highlighted in red or yellow, I suggest replacing the harddrive.
If the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics pass than their is nothing to worry about. The noise is just from the heads parking on the center of the platter, and from when the heads start to move off the park zone.

K-TRON

 

my health tab is just empty.. doesn't show any results >_< benchmark seemed normal however and error scan turned up all green squares.

 

If your health tab is empty.
Shut your system off and try entering into the BIOS.
Usually you have to press F1, F2 or Del to enter.
In the Bios their should be an option under the harddrive tab, which allows you to enable S.M.A.R.T. readings.
Once they are enabled you can visually see if the drive has had any problems.
Chances are the drive is fine, if the error scan result was all green.

K-TRON

 

For some reason in the Dell BIOS there is no mention of SMART anywhere nor any way to enable readings :/

the HDD is using ACPI rather than ATA. ACPI is the default setting. That's normal, right? ..

 

Yup, that's normal.

There should be a setting for hard drive acoustic management or hard drive performance. Set it to maximum performance, it is likely on a quiet setting or something like that.

Greg

 

Oh .. what is that about "HDD acoustics"? I think one of the things I changed in Ubuntu was related to that :/

Do you suggest that I change the acoustics setting in the bios away from the default bios setting? (I'm gonna try that now and report back) Thanks for the tip.

edit: So, the three settings available in the BIOS were Quiet, Bypass, and Performance. The default setting (which it was on) was Bypass, which the bios said "is needed for older drives" (though mine isn't an older drive). I changed it to Performance mode, which the bios says is "faster, but noisier."
I have a few questions about this.
--> Will this result in a notable decrease in battery life?
--> Why would my HDD start behaving differently from its previous behavior while on Bypass mode in both cases?

I've changed it to performance mode and let's see what happens.

 

So I thought that at first the performance mode setting made this problem go away or at least occur less frequently, but as it turns out, this isn't the case -- often times the hard drive continually spins up / down :/ are there any other options?

 

You shouldn't see much, if any, decrease in battery life.

Oddly enough, from what others have said, performance mode makes it quiet, not "quiet" mode. lol.

It should behave more like normal now.

Greg

 

depending on the drive, you will have to download the proprietary software, as i mentioned above, to control the hard drive. i had to do this with my hitachi. works great, but i have to reset it every time i cold boot. i do not know if samsung has a program to control the hard drive like hitachi does. and you thought you were in control of your computer...