Thinkpads Forum

I've had my T510 for some time now, and lately I've noticed it making random clicking sounds. Sometimes I can go for several days without hearing it, and sometimes it will do it several times in an evening. I've never heard the click more than once in an hour or so. It seems to be coming from the left side of the laptop - could it be fan related?

I honestly haven't torn into this system at all since buying it - I even ordered it with the max 8gb ram - so I don't know where everything is located. The click does sound like the dreaded "click of death" that failing hard drives use to make, but there is no apparent problem after it happens. I can keep doing whatever I want for as long as I want after the click and nothing different happens.

It's the hard drive. It is the sound of the heads engaging. I've had drives that clicked their whole life and still work fine. I've also had others that quit working very soon after I first heard it clicking. Check your power settings to see how many minutes of inactivity before the HDD is powered down. The default is usually 20 minutes. You can adjust that to Never if you like.

If it was the heads on the hd engaging, wouldn't the sound then be made either when the hd is spinning up or spinning down? I hear it at completely random times relative to what I am doing; I could be in the middle of an operation that includes hd read/writes and hear it or I might hear it when I am not doing anything that is particularly related to the hd at all.

Unless there is a bios setting that dictates power saving for the hd, I don't have any support for such a thing currently. I run Linux >99% of the time and I don't know of a setting for powering down the hd (at least, no such setting is obvious in system settings).

jayton4 wrote:It's the hard drive. It is the sound of the heads engaging. I've had drives that clicked their whole life and still work fine. I've also had others that quit working very soon after I first heard it clicking. Check your power settings to see how many minutes of inactivity before the HDD is powered down. The default is usually 20 minutes. You can adjust that to Never if you like.

You never know what the OS is doing in the background, and how the disk responds to it, so don't look for some logic or causality in it. I've had hard drives click at seemingly random times. And like jayton4 said - sometimes it's a symptom of an imminent failure, sometimes it means nothing at all.

It _can_ also be the fan, although a stuck fan motor usually does not sound like a click, but more like a rattle.

I have the same problem on a T520.