hard drive clicking

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gosha16 · #1 Post by **gosha16** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 10:25 am

i have a 3VU and my hard drive is almost always clicking. it seems like the hard drive randomly does it, however i think it does it less when im acutally using it than when its idle. i tried disabling the active protection thinking that was it however it wasnt. is anyone else getting this? any way to stop the clicking?

Chobits · #2 Post by **Chobits** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 10:32 am

Hi i hope this link might help you abit.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=1015

Cheers~

Nabeel · #3 Post by **Nabeel** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 4:17 pm

Mine used to do it, now it doesn't really do it anymore. I guess it's the drive getting used to spinning or something.

pete0r · #4 Post by **pete0r** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 6:15 pm

my 3vu does the same thing, it's a quick noise and happens a few seconds after the last one.. from what i've read it sounds like it's normal and happens to a lot of people...

Joker · #5 Post by **Joker** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 2:51 pm

I don't know which harddisk is exactly in your model, but here a story
of my T41p:

The notebook was shipped with the Hitachi 7k60 drive (7200rpm),
a nice disk, but for me this hardisk was to loud. So I went to the
next store and bought a Hitachi Drive with 5400rpm (I think that is
the disk you have). And this drive has this clicking sound every few seconds.

So I finally replaced the Hitachi drive with a Fujitsu, and this disk is perfekt! (very silent, no clicking noise, and fast enough)

bg,
Joker.

#6 Post by **K. Eng** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 2:59 pm

The clicking noise might be related to some sort of power saving mode. My Latitude CPi had a 10 GB IBM Travelstar that made a loud *CLACK* every so often that scared the hell out of me because it made me think that the drive was on the verge of breaking.

Turns out it was the activiation of a power saving feature. I went to Hitachi's website and downloaded a Travelstar utility to turn the power saving feature off. The clacking became almost unoticeable.

I've got a Fujitsu drive in my ThinkPad. No strange noises!

benz · #7 Post by **benz** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 3:09 pm

I think that there is a way to manually disable that hard drive clicking. If you install TweakUI from microsoft (from this page), then there is an option under General settings to disable "Optimize hard disk when idle". Apparently windows does constantly 'optimize' the hard drive when idle, as people have been saying on here. Here is a shot of the dialogue.

mdarnton · #8 Post by **mdarnton** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 7:47 pm

After I'd owned my T41 for a couple of weeks, the HD started soundling like there was a little man inside drumming on plastic, very quickly 1,2,3,4, with intermediate beats thrown in once in a while. Otherwise, the drive was relatively quiet. I associated that particular nose with the sound a bearing, like in a bicycle wheel, makes when it's going bad, so I called IBM support. The guy there said BACK UP NOW!, which I did, and he sent me a new drive. His urgency leads me to believe that I was right about the nature of that particular noise.

The new drive doesn't make any of that noise at all, but when there's heavy access on the drive it sounds like bursts of loud static, which I can live with, since my bicycle never made that particular noise. :-)

Anyway, I've been reading all the posts here, and usually people aren't very specific about their particular noise. Theres noise, and there's !!!NOISE!!!, and it's not a matter of loudness, but type, I think.

So, what, exactly, do you mean by "clicking"?

doylnea · #9 Post by **doylnea** » Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:35 pm

well dredging up an old thread...but at least not starting a new one.

my drive has started making a similar clicking noise, but without any regularity. It does seem to be at disk idle time and I haven't installed the TweakUI utility yet, but the drive only started doing this today, after about 2 weeks of use.

I wonder whether this is something that happens once the drives get burned in, or whether, it's something as simple as needing to change the optimize setting.

I'll dl the TweakUI and see how that affects the drive.

doylnea · #10 Post by **doylnea** » Wed Sep 01, 2004 9:33 pm

the TweakUI seems to have fixed the clicking, at least for me. I think it may have started today because I did a full hard drive defrag yesterday (which took about 1.5 hours, on a new computer, in Safe Mode...), so now the drive is trying to find everything again.

thanks for the tip benz...

hard drive clicking

hard drive clicking

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