New SAMSUNG HM080GC making clicking noise

I've just installed a new SAMSUNG HM080GC (2.5'') in my Apple PowerBook G4. Everything works fine, the HDD is extremely quiet, I first thought the Mac is not booting at all. However, from time to time the HDD makes a loud clicking noise, which sort of reminds me of the bad noise the old HDD had made before it smoke off. It *could* be just the normal sound of the head parking, though. Is this noise normal with the SAMSUNG HM080GC, or should I worry about my data?

 

A click or a clunk? Some of the recent higher capacity Samsung HDDs are known to give an intermittent clunk. This seems to be a feature and not an indicator of impending demise. This feature could well apply to the HM080GC which appears to use one side of a 160GB platter and therefore the same generation as the 320GB HDDs.

John

 

Thanks for your reply. How does a clunk sound? Well, the sound it makes sounds like violent movement of some fragile metallic needle or something... I can't describe it better, sorry. It does that only once in a while, and I think only after disk has not been accessed for sometime (but I'm not sure about that.)

 

Try downloading the samsung harddrive tool. It will allow you to change some of teh harddrives power management settings, which should get rid of the prolonged noises coming from the harddrive.

K-TRON

 

Actually I did not bother about the noise if I knew it was perfectly normal. I just wanted to know if they gave me a bad drive.

 

It is probably the R/W heads parking to save power. I think the new 320GB HDs might be noisier when doing this due to the addition of another R/W head.

 

If you are really worried then you can try the Samsung diagnostic tool. However, I would start by downloading and installing Active SMART and see if it reporting a steadily increasing number of errors.

Otherwise, I suspect the noise is normal. The HDDs periodically part their heads and may also need to recalibrate some part of the mechanism.

John