T42 Drive Clicking. Think it may be going

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indiggio · #1 Post by **indiggio** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 6:49 pm

Hello,

I'm not noticing any issues with my laptop, but the drive is making clicking noises constantly and I fear it may be on it's way out.

Anybody have any suggestions for replacement hard drives?

TIA!

ajkula66 · #2 Post by **ajkula66** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 6:54 pm

Welcome to the forum!

If you need a lot of space, this is the largest PATA laptop drive on the market:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136345

hunterman223 · #3 Post by **hunterman223** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 6:56 pm

+1 for the Samsung HM160HC. Many people (including myself) regard it as the quickest and most silent 5400rpm IDE drive available. It is a 160gb drive. What size do you have at the moment?

lukee · #4 Post by **lukee** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:44 am

Easiest way how to check health of your current drive is to download HDTune:
http://www.hdtune.com/ and in this application switch to 'Health' tab where you'll see HDD's health and S.M.A.R.T. parametres.

indiggio · #5 Post by **indiggio** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 5:25 am

Thanks everyone.

Currently only have a 33GB drive and only use about 11GB total.

I use the T42 as a home automation system and really don't need a lot of drive space.

Thus I'd rather minimize the $$$ spent rather than maximizing the hard drive space.

Regards

indiggio · #6 Post by **indiggio** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 5:27 am

Is there any way to tell why the drive is making the clicking sound?

It seems to only have started since I installed a few Windows patches a few days back.

Thanks

indiggio · #7 Post by **indiggio** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 6:17 am

lukee wrote:Easiest way how to check health of your current drive is to download HDTune:
http://www.hdtune.com/ and in this application switch to 'Health' tab where you'll see HDD's health and S.M.A.R.T. parametres.

I downloaded, installed and tried out HDTune. Unfortunately it looked pretty good from what I saw, only running @ 105F and all status ok except for a warning of 100 reallocated event count?

lukee · #8 Post by **lukee** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 6:23 am

What is a threshold in SMART for reallocated event count? If the Data value is higher than Threshold value, then your HDD has a serious problem and need to be replaced. Backup of your important is strongly recommended in that case. What's the brand and type of your HDD?

indiggio · #9 Post by **indiggio** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 7:01 am

lukee wrote:What is a threshold in SMART for reallocated event count? If the Data value is higher than Threshold value, then your HDD has a serious problem and need to be replaced. Backup of your important is strongly recommended in that case. What's the brand and type of your HDD?

It says:
(C4) Reallocated Event Count: Current: 100 Worst: 100 Threshold: 0 Data: 287703040 Status: warning

It's a Fujitsu MHT2040AH (40gB)

Thanks!

indiggio · #10 Post by **indiggio** » Tue Apr 19, 2011 8:59 am

Just want to give an update from what I found.

After following a lot of great advice from everyone, it appears as though my drive is not in it's death throes, at least not for the moment anyway.

It still irked me as to why it's making the incessant clicking noises though, as it sits right behind me.

So after a bit of searching I found Process Explorer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx

Upon firing it up, there's a few graphs across the top, clicking on the drive graph expands it. If you hover your pointer over the right hand side of the line, it will tell you what process is hitting the drive.

Lo and behold, Windows Search is running!!!

Wait, I have Indexing disable, but what's Windows Search? Looking at the services, there it is and it's started!

After disabling that, the drive suddenly got a lot quieter for some reason!

As I said, I just installed some Windows patches the other day. I'm really thinking that one of them might have been the culprit...

Thanks!

craigmontHunter · #11 Post by **craigmontHunter** » Tue Apr 19, 2011 9:34 am

windows search is diffrent from indexing, it is comparable to the windows vista and 7 search, sort of a clone to google desktop. If you don't need it, you can probably uninstall it. For some reason, microsoft has been bundling it as an update if you use microsoft update (as opposed to windows update)