A 150 "noise"

I have a new A150, and I love it so far. But I have a question. The machine is extremely quiet, but I occasionally hear a slight "clicking" kind of sound, which seems to come from the left half of the machine. From my experience with laptops, I would guess it's a noise from the hard drive. Can this be considered "normal" with the Sony, or should I bring the unit back to be exchanged?

 

This is where the hard drive is. Can you be more specific what kind of noise it is? Is it much louder than the 'normal' noise HDDs make when they are active, or is it a loud clicking noise that just occurs once in a while. From my experience the Hitachi HDDs make louder search noises than Fujitsu HDDs. Maybe it's only the head going to the 'parking' position.

In any case you might back up all important information frequently.

 

It's not very loud; kind of a low-level clicking/ticking sound that lasts for perhaps a half second at a time, and occurs intermittently whenever I'm on the computer. The reason I notice it is because it is virtually the only sound the computer makes, since the fan is so quiet. On a computer with a louder fan, I probably would not have paid attention to it. In any case, the question remains whether the A150 HDD makes such a sound as a normal occurrence?

 

It's probably a Hitachi HDD, and the sound would be 'normal' in that case (just my estimate)

You could check the manufacturer in the device manager if you are interested.

 

I have the same issue with a TR3 I just got, the noise is also coming from the Hard Drive and it is pretty annoying because sometimes it happens every minute or so. I was wondering if mine was defective but from what you are saying this is normal?

 

I have an A270 and I hear a clicking/tapping noise coming definitely from the hard drive when it's in idle state. The noise sounds like 3 clicks per second, similar to a traffic light for the visually impaired when it's time to cross.

I checked that the noise is not related to normal disk activity by downloading DiskMon (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/diskmon.shtml) and noticing that the hard drive clicks only when there's no disk activity. This was reinforced by a HDTune (www.hdtune.com) read test of 40 minutes - the hard disk didn't make any noises at all during the test.

The hard disk doesn't seem defective though - I ran a Level 4 Spinrite 6 (http://grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) test on it for 5 hours and there were no bad or reallocated sectors detected.

Beware though that SONY has a Knowledge Base article about this issue:

http://129.33.22.16:80/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE/,/?St=36,E=0000000000437626186,K=697,Sxi=2,Case=obj%28127613%29

Naturally, the ScanDisk didn't fix the issue so I guess I have to return my laptop ?!

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yes this is perfectly normal for the drives that shipped with the A-Series laptops. I know this after reading about it in many other threads. Also, I just upgraded my A150 hard drive to a 7200rpm Hitachi 60-gig drive. The noise is now gone. I also dropped the old drive into a USB enclosure and still hear the noise whenever it is powered up. Kinda sounds like a chirping bird?

-s

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by skelzer
I also dropped the old drive into a USB enclosure and still hear the noise whenever it is powered up.
<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'></font id='quote'></blockquote id='quote'>

Well mine doesn't make any unusual noise when powered up; only when idle does it click/chirp.

<blockquote id='quote'>quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by skelzer
Kinda sounds like a chirping bird?
<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'></font id='quote'></blockquote id='quote'>

skelzer, I'm trying to decide if the hard disk is in danger to fail given this noise. Can you point me to some of those threads you found about this topic?

Also, has anyone ever had a failed SONY laptop hard-disk? If so, do you remember if it made a chirping bird/tapping/clicking noise before failing?

Thanks,
Dan


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Mine also makes occasional clicking noises; and I do believe this is normal. Download HDTUNE and view the 's.m.a.r.t.' disk info to doublecheck.


Sony VAIO A290

 

Newsflash: my noisy hard disk I mentioned in this thread crashed after three weeks. It was an 80Gb 5400rpm Hitachi HTS548080M9AT00, firmware revision MG40A53A.

Read more here:

http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11130

So if yout hard disk makes strange noises when idle, consider getting it replaced.

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Can anyone give me instructions on how to access the harddrive on my A150. I want to upgrade it to a 7200 rpm Hitachi 60 gig.

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by skelzer

 

Refer to this post I made in another forum for your info:

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?p=469839#post469839

Enjoy!
-s