The official Hard drive clicking noise thread

There is a problem that numerous laptops exhibit which involves an annoying clicking sound that comes from the hard drive. It is not the sound of the hard drive dying, and appears to mostly happen when the hard drive is not being accessed by software that is recorded by disk activity monitoring utilities, such as "filedog". This is know to be a flaw, not a feature, and is highly annoying for those of us who do a lot of reading off the screen. I am experiencing the problem with a thinkpad r60e.

Here is a recording of the sound, first at about the 3.25 second mark:
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This article:
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mentions dell has released some sort of patch for it for their systems, but that still leaves the rest of us without a solution.

It may be something to do with the chipset that these laptops have in common. Apparently, some people are reporting it happens regardless of the OS you are running.

edit: (I had to remove the URLs because notebook review doesn't allow me to leave them in an edited post until I've made 15 posts. How incredibly stupid.) I'm back after a looong time, still having the problem. I thought somebody might have figured it out by now, given how common, and how anoying, the problem is. I thought I had improevd this intro post, but it sucks and is misleading, so I guess not.

I have another post later on in this thread that is lays out what I had tried so far, and how it didn't work, as well as some ideas as to what was wrong. The long and the short is that NOTHING I have tried works, no combination of software, getting the hard drive to be accesesd on a regular basis, nothing. Even rebooting doesn't work sometimes. I have been coping withit by doing a virus scan whenever it starts acting up, and that seems to keep it quiet for a while, at least. Some people are saying there are some things (that I also tried) that worked for them, though.

As for what the cause is, the info in the original version of this post is probably way off base. The dell problem might even be a different problem (then again, maybe not). Hard drives can make clicking noises for a great variety of reasons, apparently. So listen to the recording before posting, too. The current best theory, as far as I can see, is that it's something to do with the hard drive's firmware and/or powersave features, not any of the rest of the laptop. The hard drive might be turning it's drive electronics off to save power, and since they help prevent the head from crashing into the disk, the head needs to be retracted before this happens. Paradoxically, if you turn the noise managment features OFF, maybe this would help, see elsewhere in this thread for details. I have tried to do that, though, and for whatever reason it didn't work, even trying to do things through the bios one way or another (it was a long time ago, not quite sure why it didn't work now). This is how the HDparm thing works, but it was linux only last time I checked, but people seem to be saying there's a windows version out now.... I think I'll try that next, actually.

Also, I have reposted the noise file, since it seems to have expired.
Modify this as appropriate, taking out spaces and adding an ht tp
www mediafire com /?mymqx2mibis

edit: There is a post of mine below that says that something worked, but it was actually apparently the problem being intermittent. I thought it had stopped, but apparently I was wrong, it was having to effect. I have not edited that post because I would have to waste time circumventing the stupid URL rule

 

I can confirm it happens independent of OS; in fact it happens even when no OS is loaded (say, while in the BIOS). What is the common component causing this problem? It seems to be independent of laptop brands. I would be interested to know whether it is due to a particular brand of hard drive. Mine is a Seagate.

My speculation is that the sound is due to a recalibrating of the drive heads, but again that's just a guess. Also, as mentioned in the post above, there doesn't seem to be any defect associated with the sound (at least none has been identified yet); it's just annoying, especially in quiet environments.

For reference, I'm using an Asus G1 with a Seagate hard drive.

 

Thanks for confirming it's independent of OS. I'm pretty sure it's independent of hard drive brand and manufacturer. My HD is a fujitsu in a r60e 0659 h9u.

I just found this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/archive/index.php/t-168183.html

Which has a suggested solution, and a hint towards an explanation at the lower part of the thread.

It didn't work for me, though. I download the software and the options on the hard drive tab are not available. I searched the faq here :
http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc_faq.htm (search "hard disk")
and it says this is due to the features not being supported on my system. Maybe it can be changed some other way. There is also information about how hard drive power management is implemented lower down on the page.

It appears to be suggesting that this problem stems from power management of the hard drive. Maybe the drive is going in and out of standby?

 

I have ASUS F3JP and already had a Hitachi HD and now i have Seagate.
Both have that sound.
Happens on windows, linux and even on bios (no OS!).
Browsing through different forums i found too many people with this problem, no matter brands.

There are two "solutions" both on this thread:

1-NHC (the most popular)
2-HD Tune (lost somewhere on that thread)

I don't like programs like NHC (or RMC) and don't need them, so i just turn on HDTune, minimize to tray and the clicking sound is gone, completely.

 

My macbook did it. My new Aspire does it. My external WD Passport did it (my first one, not my new one). Very common I'd say.

 

Excellent link, slowdive! I'm particularly interested in the linux command " hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" as I run linux most of the time. I typed in this command and for the past 10-15 minutes, I haven't heard a single click. Also, prefer this option to installing and loading a program at startup.

About hdparm, here is an excerpt from the man page:

-B Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it.
A low value means aggressive power management and a high value
means better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the
drive.

Any ideas on what the default is?

 

I found a link you might be interested in fizikz
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking

Maybe you've already seen it, but in any case this is only a solution for those running linux....
I tried HDTune, and it works! (Edit: Apparently it just accesses the drive every 5 seconds or so, thus preventing the drive from ever being idle, thus preventing the ticking) But it's not an ideal solution, so I tried to change the hard drive's acoustic and/or power managment levels. So far no success. I :
- looked in the bios for promising settings and tried changing things and rebooting a few times. Nothing worked, and I looked through all the settings.
- Tried http://www.hddlife.com/eng/download-freeware.html . "Hddlife", it says none of my hard drives are SMART enabled. Well, I happen to know mine is. What it really means by that, according to the faq is that it's not compatible with my system.

I'll keep looking a bit for a solution but I've already spent too much time on this...

 

I just started a thread about this in the Asus subforum a few days ago, as the Hitachi HD in my G1S is also making quite audible, and often very regular, "tick, tick, tick" noises - seemingly mostly when the system appears to be idling (it disappears entirely under heavy and moderately heavy load).

A lot of Google searching got me a few of the same links you guys posted, and the one at thinkwiki.org seemed to provide the plausible explanation that particularly Hitachi drives are apparantly parking their head very aggressively, which is what makes the sound (and since it's often parking near constantly, I imagine that means there's really very rarely such a thing as complete "idling" in a at least Vista - it writes a few bytes every second a few, logs or whatever, and then parks the head again).

I burned a boot DVD with the Hitachi Features tool - acoustic management was already set to "quiet". I tried turning Advanced Power Management up to max performance, figuring it might keep it from parking all the time, but the only thing I got was some apparant extra HD activity the first few minutes after booting into Windows again, and a near constant increase in fan speed (and unwanted noise was sort of what I was trying to get rid of in the first place ). The ticking began again as soon as the system was "idling".

The HD Tune program mentioned further up the thread - what good is that going to do?
I visited their site and it shows it's a harddisk test tool, but seemingly not one where you can change any settings (as I did without luck with the Hitachi tool anyway) - so how is that going to help out? Do you let it run constantly so there's always disk activity, meaning no or only rare clicks?
Seems like a somewhat forceful solution to me.

In any case though, the last few hours I've been sitting here reading and writing on the laptop, I've noticed that the clicking sound - most of the time anyway - isn't anywhere near as frequent and persistent as it has been the last few days. I get a tick roughly every 3-15 seconds, while before it was almost like listening to the seconds ticking away on a loud analog clock.
I've only had this laptop for a week and a half, so perhaps the really severe clicking/ticking the last few days was the harddrive "settling in". Or so I hope at least .

 

Yes, about HDTune.

I was hesitant to try the hitachi feature tool, especially because the thinkpad bios will apparently just reset the acoustic management anyway after rebooting.

But we ought to remember that others will probably come along wanting to solve this problem later, so I'll leave a paper trail and maybe this thread will become an actual resource :
This page has some useful links for and info about acoustic management.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Acoustic_Management
hitachi's feature tool
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

how to change acoustic managment on a mac

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041014005324939

 

As mentioned it seemed that acoustic management was already set to "quiet" as default on my new laptop - but of course I don't know if that's the case for all Hitachi Travelstar harddrives.

I tried turning it up to the loudest setting as well, and it was the overall spinning/seek/whatever noise of the HD that became louder (quite a bit actually, so in any case it might be useful to run the tool to check the setting if anyone is bothered by the overall noise of their drive) - no apparant change to the head parking clicks in terms of noise level or frequency.

Anyway, I think I'm starting to learn to mentally tune out the sound - even when I'm just passively reading. And as mentioned it really does seem like the frequency of the clicks is way down today on my harddrive compared to the past couple of days.

 

Did you listen to the recording above? You seem to be describing a different problem than the one this thread is about.

Admittedly, there are a lot of circumstances under which hard drives produce clicking sounds, but that's why I posted a recording. But, the sound I'm talking about is essentially from the heads changing position - whether fully docking or not, and obviously that in turn can have a number of causes.

It's actually the opposite, too with regards to the acoustic management. That is, if you turn off the acoustic management feature, that seems to get rid of the clicking. The reason being that apparently the hard drive manufacturer's just screwed up, I suppose.

So to recap what I've found out :
Using filemon, I found that the sound happens even when there is no accessing the hard drive at all. So it's not just the click happening (like the head undocking from a standby mode) when windows accesses a file regularly or something. This has been confirmed by others, the drive clicks even when in the bios.

The sound is a result of the hard drive heads changing position. They are probably docking and undocking, from the sound, which is relatively loud compared to seeking.

This could be caused by what essentially amounts to a mistake in the implementation of the hard drive's acoustic management feature (what, specifically?).
It could be a result of an attempt to improve reliability of the drive - apparently some manufacturer's make the head of the drive move around while the drive is idle to prevent the head from idling over only one track. Why it would have to move around so violently and be louder than a normal seek....
It could be a result of the power managment feature of the drive docking the head (so it can then turn off the electronics). In any case it can just turn them off until a file is next accessed, why they have to be turned on and off repeatedly....
Someone said something about the heads re-calibrating.

Obviously none of these are quite satisfactory explanations, but....

In any case, it is almost always solved by turning off the acoustic and/or power managment features of the drive, or preventing the drive from idling.
How do you turn off those features? Well, there's the software mentioned above, and some bioses have a setting for it. I haven't tried the hitachi thing yet and none of the above software for that was compatible with my system. I can prevent the drive from idling, though, using HDTune.

 

Ahuan, thanks for the link; I hadn't come across that specific one. The info about hdparm seems useful.

Miths, your description about the frequency of the clicks (every 3-15 seconds) is exactly the situation I had with my Asus G1. I returned the original G1 I had gotten (about a year ago now) because at the time I thought it might be a defect. The replacement I got clicked less frequently, although the clicks weren't gone. Both had a Seagate hard drive. However, either I've become accustomed to the clicks or they've become much less frequent (or both). Now I rarely notice the click sound anymore, which is why I haven't been actively pursuing a solution. In fact, now that I try to hear clicks for the purpose of evaluating the effect of hdparm commands, I must wait on the order of at least 5 minutes to hear a single click. With the problem being reduced to this point, I no longer feel it necessary to tamper with settings. However, I'm not sure how or why the frequency of the clicks has gone down, but it's interesting that you mention the same observation. I've had my G1 for almost a year now.

On a side note, the clicks are only audible in a quiet environment; in a commercial building, the sound of some ventilation systems is usually sufficient to drown out the clicks to the point where one must attentively listen to detect a hint of it.

 

I'm almost certain there was actually no way to turn those features entirely off using the Hitachi tool.

Acoustic management was a slider from 128 (quiet, and apparantly the default) to 254 (high performance).

Power management was also a slider - though with some hex decimal numbers.
I saw a screenshot in the pdf manual for the tool (looked like a Hitachi harddrive model that might have been a few years old) where the mid setting was shown as off, but unless my memory fails me entirely (and in any case I'm sure I would have tried it if the option was sitting there staring at me ), the slider shown for my harddrive ranged from battery saving over medium power management (not quite what it was called, but something to that extent) to high performance.

I'll probably give it another look tomorrow though. While the clicking is no longer the severe annoyance it's been for a couple of days, cutting down on it further certainly wouldn't hurt.

 

Hey that sound is exactly the sound I have sometimes been hearing from my Fujitsu MHV2100BH 100GB drive. Here is a thread I posted about it a long time ago: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1867812
(The system event thing is fixed already.. ) I was suggested the drive was dying. The clicking sure is annoying and I can tell it actually affects performance, since sometimes when I have been gaming it have caused lags/stuttering. Fortunately the clicking doesn't happen very often.

 

I've been getting the same clicking sound on this new notebook.

Does anyone have a link to the patch from dell?

 

yea man i jus got my new insprion for 4 days now and it has a 120g 7200rpm HD. at first eveytin is ok but now it i hear clicking sounds between different intervals, and i hear a more frequent cliking when the system is idle. is there a fix for this? cause i refuse to believe that my HD is already messed up when its so new, unless DELL send me some refurbished ****. like darkseven i too would like a site to fix this. anyone know?

 

Hey all... I have an HP Pavillion that has been making the EXACT sound that is in the recording on the first post of this thread. It's been in multiple times for testing to see if I can get it replaced. Nothing ever shows up on tests. From reading this, I gather that it's a "normal" noise and not a click of death. My question to all is this: My unit will begin to click at random, it will begin when idle or when running CPU heavy programs, so it seems to have no preference. It will click at random, not always on startup. Sometimes it'll start clicking right away, other times it can go days without sound. The main thing is though, that when it starts, it will not stop until the unit is shut down. Is anyone else having this exact issue with timing of the clicks? It also has become more frequent lately whereas I see many people are experiencing a less frequent cases as time goes on. Thanks

 

What do you mean by that exactly? How frequent are the clicks once they start?

The clicks occur at random and on my laptop they can happen within a few seconds of each other, or it might go a couple of minutes between clicks. Furthermore, I can confirm that changing the power saving parameter in linux stops the clicks altogether:

Code:

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

 

Hey everyone, I found that actually none of the solutions in this thread work for me. It turns and it was just bit torrent in the background accessing the hard disk or something that was preventing the hard disk from clicking, but of course it doesn't always do that. I also tried the BIOS stuff. None of it worked. I did manage to get notebook hardware control supposedly working though. It turned out that Norton go back was interfering with it and the other software that was supposed to be capable of changing the acoustic management settings. So I suppose either notebook hardware control and the other software that is supposed be changing the parameters for the acoustic and/or power management settings is not actually changing the settings, or changing those parameters doesn't actually always work. So now I just keep bit torrent running with something popular enough that someone is always downloading it.

 

I am hearing what seems to be the same sound with my new MS-1719. So far I've been trying to find out what was making the sounds (like the cpu fan or something else). But like so many people on this forum, I only get the sound when the system is idle. The sound comes up the most when I scroll up and down something like internet explorer with no other applications up.

The notebook is under the tree right now, but once I'm "allowed" to play with it some more, I'll try some of the solutions. Hopefully, I'll be able to tell if the sound is the HD or not.

Also, is this sound only coming out of 7,200 rpm drives (that's what I have)?

 

Also, my noise is not a single click. It's more of a grinding noise

 

I get the click on my 5400rpm drive, so, no it's not exclusive to 7200rpm drives.

As for the "grinding" sound, I'm not sure about that. The noise most of us have been describing is definitely a click. Following that I often get a slightly "springy" sound as, what I would assume to be the drive heads, or rather the boom, move back into normal position. A grinding sound may be due to normal disk activity, but it really depends on the sound. Maybe it's normal, maybe not...

 

Just listen to the fricking recording I posted. In windows there is a "microphone boost" thing that greatly increases the sensitivity of your microphone. Open the master volume thing and click options, properties, recording, check the mic box. Then, click options show advanced settings....

 

is clicking when the disk is being accessed normal? makes a constant clicking sound whenever the hard drive is busy, but silent when its idle.. its not so loud but its audible when in a very quiet environment. but everything seems to be alright. its been a few days..

 

A certain type of clicking or rather grinding noise is normal during read/write operations. The click this thread discusses is the one described by the audio posted by the OP.

 

I know maybe this isn't the thread for my specific noise problem, but I'm posting it here anyways because maybe somebody can help me. I've had an ASUS F3sV model for aabout three weeks, and since the beggining I've heard a really annoying noise coming from the hard drive. It's a constant click, kind of like the one produced by an analog watch. It usually never stops, unless the HDD is doing some serious work (searching form something, disk defragmenting, etc). It's not that loud but in quiet enviroments it become really annoying. For example it's a pain to sleep with the PC on because of the fridging tic sound. Ah, the HDD led of the PC lights everytime the sound occurs.

I've run almost all kinds of tests on the HD. The SMART status of the disk seem to be perfectly ok, and I've also run the HITACHI Feature Tool and Fitness Test. The drive seems to be ok.
I'm getting kinda frustrated because supposedly the drive of a laptop released in mid-2007 and just with a month of use should be perfectly silent. This sucks and I'm really frustrated. The other problem I have is that I live in Colombia, South America, and Asus doesn't have warranty representation here. I bought the PC in the US but Arrived the day I was coming back so I didnt have time to "test" it there. I'm pissed.

Anyways, I also made a recording of the sound with my home mic. xD It doesn't sound as clear as i wish it could, but oh well. I'm pretty sure you guys will hear the sound. It starts right from second 1.
Download the file from here: http://www.mediafire.com/?7gzmryzmlom

What do you think I should do? Is my drive going to crash soon? Or should I believe Hitachi's test and SMART data?
Ah, I almost forgot, my pc says the drive is a HITACHI HTS542516k9SA00. It's 160 GB.

Thanks a lot for any help.

 

That sound is very frequent; much more so than the clicking I was experiencing. Also, I'm not certain that it's the same clicking sound described in this thread, partly due to the sound quality of the recording. Listen to the clicking sound audio file posted earlier in this thread to compare for yourself.

Personally, I don't find that frequency of clicking acceptable, whether the drive is healthy or not. If you're running linux, try the command "sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" (without the quotes). If that makes it go away, then perhaps it's "normal".

 

The HD in my M1730 clicks occasionally. It sounds like it's parking the heads. It sounds, in fact, like it's doing an emergency head park after detecting an impending drop.

You can recreate the noise by unmounting the drive (whilst still connected and powered) and giving it a sharp twist along the longest axis. I do NOT recommend you actually do this with a drive you want to keep!

During operation, I cannot hear my HD at all. It will make the clicking noise quite randomly (though not often) and not always during idle periods. As it is a new drive, I am thinking that it's possibly part of the normal bad-block remapping process. If it continues, I will possibly look to RMA it. Except, I'm due an upgrade within the next 6 months to 2x200GB RAID, so I may just retire the drive anyway.

 

The hard drive in my HP Pavillion (WD Scorpio) has the same clicking. WD released some sort of patch for it, but it apparently does not work.

For sure, it's related to the power savings management regardless of chipset. There's no way around it unless you use hdparm or any other program that forces continual access on the HDD.

 

get a ssd, and it'll stop clicking, when my fans are off, i don't hear a thing.

 

I have a HP dv2700t which is barely a month old and it is also clicking. I've been searching online for hours about this problem and no resolution. It's definitely a Vista thing. I did read though on one site that some people installed Vista SP1rc and the click went away. I'm guessing we're supposed to wait for the service pack to come out before the clicking goes away!!

 

You're no Sherlock Holmes that's for sure
It's not a vista thing.
I have xp and have the same problem.
And this problem is older than vista.

 

Any news?

I discovered that sometimes even when my computer is idle, it doesn't happen. If I leave my computer on overnight, it will have started by morning.

I also found out that keeping a p2p app downloading something doesn't seem to work. It might have never worked, and was just a coincidence.

I've tried playing large movie files in the background too, files too large to be stored in RAM, so presumably the hard drive must be accessed, presumably repeatedly. Doesn't work.

Rebooting seems to help. I then keep the computer busy with virus scans and regular work, and it gets me a few hours.

I now thoroughly wish I had gotten a desktop.

 

Sorry buddy. No news. My last post I mentioned the new service pack would help...well, it doesn't.

 

I think the loudest drive I ever had was a 20Gb 7200rpm maxtor harddrive. You could literally hear it click about 100ft away. It was a desktop drive, but still it was fricken loud. Its not that the drive had problems. I bought three of them, and even new they were really loud.

The most amazing sounding harddrives is an array of 15k Hitachi Ultrastars.
You have not lived until you defrag a raid 0 stripe over 4 147Gb Hitachi 15000rpm harddrives. The high pitched noise output from the harddrives sounds like the turbocharger on my Peterbilt truck.

K-TRON

 

Its not a core 2 duo laptop is it?
If it is then there's lots of info on noises they make. Search in google for core 2 duo whine. There is a solution in the form of a utility called RMCLOCK.

 

am i the only one not annoyed by the clicking? its very faint. im tempted to buy a decibel meter and record the clicks.

 

I am offically renaming the hard drive clickign noise to a DELL TORTURE DEVICE.

I am literally a few days away from returning my brand new M1530 laptop because of this sound. It is the loudest thing on my entire computer .. in fact the loudest sound emitted by any computer I have owned since the dawn of time.

BUT I cant decide if it is more or less annoying than the WHINING coming from these CPU's .... god I hate dell


anyway ... here are some fresh recordings of the click. They were recorded wtih a directional microphone sitting face down ontop of the hard drive location. The steady humming you can hear in the background is the M1530's fan.

clack1.wav
clack2.wav
clack4.wav
clack5.wav

In the recording it might sound like this sound is faint .. but trust me .. it is at least 5x louder than the normal drive accessing sounds ... many times louder even than the spin-down spin-up sound the drive will make if Power Options shuts it down (DIFFERENT FROM PARKING).

I have found out that AAM (acoustaic management) does not work over SATA. This agrees with the fact that NEITHER of the three settings in the bios make a difference in hard drive sound (bypass, quiet, performance).

Dell will have a $1,600 return on their hands if this is not fixed VERY soon

 

wow, I have two high speed 7200rpm drives in my system, and I do not hear a damn thing.
Maybe your ears are very tuned to hearing very faint noises.
I own a landscapng business, so maybe my ears are shot, but I do not have any problem with harddrive noise.
To me, the louder the harddrive the better. It helps me to physically know that its working.

What harddrive do you have in your notebook, maybe its just a defective drive. fujitu and toshiba drives tend to be loud. Some Hitachi models are also loud.
I would stick with seagate or samsung for quiet notebook harddrives.

Let me throw this in, there is no such thing as cpu whine
Its called a fan. A cpu has no moving parts, therefore it cannot make noise.
Why do you think cpu rightmark is the fix, they want you to undervolt the cpu, so that it uses less power and thus the fan comes on less.

K-TRON

 

Ok, I have officially tried NHC(again, was never completely stable and would crash after some use). And the clicking is completely gone!

Personally I would love to continue to use NHC for all my notebook features (dynamic switching, undervolting, ACPI fan control, temps, as well as AMM) but for the lack of words for it; NHC is really sh!tty when it comes to stability. I have tried downgrading .NEt frameworks, and using slightly older versions to no avail. It's definitely not the Windows install or my system as I've reinstalled my XP dozens of times on my W3V..

Once I shut down NHC, the clicking starts again.
Is there an alternative for the Windows Platform for AMM control management? I've searched Google and it seems that there isn't a single app other than NHC that supports this, which is really bizarre.

 

ryaske, i know what you mean. i'm thinking about returning it, but iono which notebooks make this sound which don't. does anyone notice like a constant clicking? when the computer boots up...almost like static?

 

I have exactly the same noise problem... sigh.

 

I forgot this problem as long as I used NHC.. now, as undervolting with it does not work with Vista (or Vista SP1, or both) I had to change to RMClock. The clicking is of course back after uninstalling NHC.

For long hours now I've been trying to find software like NHC to change the AAM mode for my hd but none of them work. Seagate says their drives no longer support changing AAM modes but somehow obviously NHC managed to do it. Is there no other software than NHC that can do this ? Softwares I tried that all reported "error changing AAM" or "AAM not supported":

-Hd Sentinel
-Hd Tune Pro
-HDDScan
-Seatools
-WinAAM

My laptop is Asus G1 with Seagate momentus 5400rpm 160gb. Please help !

 

HD tune works fine on my 160 gb seagate (ASUS F3JP).
On deel forum there's a big topic and one of the solutions is HDparm.
Never used it so you'll have to find how it works.

Link

PS: They start with NHC but somewhere in that thread they star talking about HDparm.

 

using hdparm in windows xp and vista, with a seagate. works like a charm.

just create a shortcut with the command "hdparm.exe -B 254 hda" and put it in startup folder so it loads with windows. you can leave another shortuc around to activate when you sleep/hibernate

 

Never mind - I found it!

 

How does it stops the clicking?Reducing the rpm?

 

Will try HDparm for windows after doing a backup. Beware, folks, according to the wikipedia entry, you should backup your system before using the software. One typo, and your hard drive could be toast, apparently.

 

It disables the power management on the drive so that it won't bother to park it's head during idle periods. This also prevents that odd pause when it comes back out of the park state.

 

Does this mean my hp dv7 hardrive is not dying?