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    Ticking Hard Drive!

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Commander Wolf, Sep 14, 2007.

  1. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

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    So the other day I obtained a used notebook hard drive, a Hitachi "Travelstar" 40GB, 5400RPM, model number HTS548040M9AT00.

    I figured it was a great time to upgrade the 30GB, 4200RPM drive on my Dell Inspiron 500m and I check to see if both drives were ATA/IDE, 5V, 1A, etc. Great, all the numbers seemed to match up, I swapped the drives, did a fresh install and everything seems to work fine.

    And then the blasted thing starts to tick. It's a really faint ticking sound and it comes on at seemingly arbitrary times and goes away if I move the mouse or open a file or enter something on the keypad. If I don't do anything it keeps on ticking.

    Thus, I took the new drive and plugged it into my desktop via my big IDE to small IDE adaptor and let it run for a while... guess what, it doesn't tick. Put it back into the laptop... and the ticking comes back.

    A Google search turns up only records of failing drives, but I've heard what those sound like and this is not it. Furthermore, I don't think the drive is about to kill itself because it's been running in my desktop for a few days now without fail. Someone please explain to me why this damn drive is ticking!

    Thanks in advance!
     
    Commander Wolf, Sep 14, 2007
    #1
  2. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    Hitachi HDDs tend to be quite noisy. The ticking can be the normal head movement noise.

    You can use the Hitachi tools to select a different acoustic management option. While you are there, you may also want to run the fitness test.

    You can also use Active SMART to monitor the HDD's SMART data. In theory, this should pick up any health problem as increasing numbers of errors should be reported.

    John
     
    John Ratsey, Sep 14, 2007
    #2