Slightly annoying "ticking" sound from hard drive

Message

Mofongo · #1 Post by **Mofongo** » Thu May 27, 2004 11:56 pm

I have to say, I am really impressed with my T42p so far. The only annoyance I have found is that the drive tends to make this sharp "tick" sound when accessed...and Windows seems to like to do an access about once per second for up to 10 seconds even when I am not doing anything.

I hear this steady "tick.....tick......tick......tick" about once per second. It is slightly louder (but not much) than the regular clicks and whirrs of normal disk access. I think it's the heads going back to the park position as part of their "Adaptive Battery Life Extender" technology. The ticking, I am guessing, is the heads sliding up the ramp that they park on.

Does anybody else here this kind of thing??? I am wondering if I just got an unusually noisy drive.

It's the 5400RPM 80GB (Hitachi 5K80 line)

On the other hand, I have yet to hear the fan come on except briefly at boot time. So I probably hear the ticking because the machine itself is so quiet.

Mofongo

taphil · #2 Post by **taphil** » Fri May 28, 2004 4:14 am

I have that tick noise on my 40GB drive. I called tech support and they had me do the PC Doctor disk scan and Hitachi's disk scan, and the drive passed both tests.

In my case, it happens when the computer is idle. It'll tick tick tick for maybe 10 minutes before it stops. If I tilt the computer to force APS to shut down the hard drive, the sound stops, but starts again when the drive spins back up.

akerman · #3 Post by **akerman** » Fri May 28, 2004 4:49 am

That's normal. Apparantly a feature of the hitachi drive. I found it incredibly annoying when I first got my t41p, now I don't notice it so much anymore.

RaysMD · #4 Post by **RaysMD** » Fri May 28, 2004 6:33 am

same here. my T41p does the same thing.

eriqesque · #5 Post by **eriqesque** » Fri May 28, 2004 9:36 am

My Hitcahi 80GN 80Gb also did this on my T40
I am not sure what it is
But it will calm down when I first got it the HD would do this
quite often but for some reason it seems to do this less and less the more the HD ages along.

ian · #6 Post by **ian** » Fri May 28, 2004 9:47 am

I think I may have found a cure for this problem...

http://www.elvex.com/prod021.htm

HTH

Mofongo · #7 Post by **Mofongo** » Fri May 28, 2004 11:19 am

ian wrote:I think I may have found a cure for this problem...

http://www.elvex.com/prod021.htm

Hey! That's great! I can get rid of that annoying drive ticking and my fiance's incessent chatter at the same time!

Mofongo

P.S. Has anyone ever noticed that at soon as you sit down to work at your laptop in public, the whole world wants to talk to you?

Mofongo · #8 Post by **Mofongo** » Fri May 28, 2004 11:43 am

Actually, the noise seems to be getting quieter already. I wonder if it's the drive being "broken in" or my brain's noise filter adapting.

Mofongo

cynic · #9 Post by **cynic** » Fri May 28, 2004 11:54 am

Supposedly, WinXP does background drive boot optimization. Eventually, it becomes "optimized" and doesn't do it anymore. My HGST drive doesn't have any ticking sounds anymore (disappeared within 2 weeks) Microsoft used to host a page about boot optimization of hard drives, but removed it when non-developers started to use the tools there to force "optimization"; the point is to have systems boot under 20seconds.

Slightly annoying "ticking" sound from hard drive

Slightly annoying "ticking" sound from hard drive

Who is online