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270

DO something about the "click click" noise of laptop hard drives!!!

270 points posted to Accessories (Keyboards, etc.), Laptops by cestuila Mar 30

Hi,

Please Mr head of Dell Support, could you really do something about this noise?
I have it on my D630. But I know people have it on their XPS M1530, on their Inspiron 9400, and other brands have the same problem
( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=100609 )

No, this is not the hard drive indexing files. This is a specific horrible noise, a "click" that pops out once in a while, probably due to the HDD heads parking themselves.

Dell has already sent me another hard drive (Samsung 120GB hybrid in my case) but this hasn't changed anything.

Don't know if the problem comes from MS Windows, the hard drive's firmware or the Sata controller in Dell notebooks, but PLEASE do something!!!

cestuila
Mar 30		 Here's a good article explaining the problem caused by a power management issue:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=591503
(just to show that this is not a scarce problem!)
See how this affects the hard drive's life expectancy?
See how you will have waste hours changing hard drives when they all die prematurely?
cestuila
Mar 30		 Some people have found sort of a solution with Notebook Hardware Control ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425 )
BUT this is NOT a true solution as it means the Hard Drive will constantly be on max performance:
--> lower life expectancy
--> lower battery life (probably 1/2 hour lost) as the HDD will consume more power
--> more heat
--> no more free fall protection
--> NHC requires to be run as Administrator (which not every user can/wants)

Please offer us a TRUE solution to this issue...
cestuila
Mar 30		 Support and comments welcome :-)
aikiwolfie
Mar 30		 You can fix this problem by using an SSD. ;o)
cestuila
Mar 30		 I actually thought about that solution...
And when I suggested to my Dell Support person to exchange my 120GB 5400rpm for a SSD, he said it will not be possible. I wonder why... XD
aikiwolfie
Mar 30		 Hmm don't know. I was under the impression the SSDs Dell are using were designed to slot into a normal laptop HDD drive bay and be interchangeable with HDDs. Perhaps it's a cost issue. A 64GB SSD does still cost more than a 120GB HDD. Perhaps Dell are understandably not prepared to absorb that cost.

Is the clicking noise just annoying or is it causing actual damage?
cestuila
Mar 30		 Of course it's a cost issue ;) My answer had, in that sence, a touch of irony in it ;)
SSD are still much more expensive than good old HDD, even though I paid a bit more for the option of a Hybrid HDD.

The clicking noise is:
- annoying and stressful, because it is not regular. So you do not really expect it. It can happen 10 times within a minute as well as the HDD can be totally silent for half an hour. It really depends.

- causing damage. Indeed, a HDD has an estimated lifetime based on the working hours, but also based on the number of times the heads will park themselves. With this unresolved problem, the heads park themselves far too often... Hence the risk of premature "death". I therefore have to backup my data more often than I would normally do, to prevent loss.
aikiwolfie
Mar 30		 Well if you're worried about data loss or handling data you simply can't afford to lose then I'd recommend a solid backup routine based on the grand father, father, son principle as a matter of course and not just because your scared your hard drive is going to die an early death. Hard drives die early deaths for all manner of reasons. So in that sense this situation is unique. Your hard drive is simply experiencing more wear and tear than we would otherwise expect.

By damage what I meant was are you losing data as a result of this problem?
cestuila
Mar 30		 Thank god no, I haven't lost any data yet. But I might be loosing life expectancy because of my own stress... (joke)
aikiwolfie
Mar 30		 Well look on the bright side. You'll pay less tax when your dead. As for the hard drive. So long as Dell are prepared to honor the warranty I'm not sure what else can be done.

Obviously in future products we'd like to see this problem resolved. Which raises the question, what component is at fault? Is it the OS? The hard drive? The BIOS settings? What's causing the aggressive head parking in the first place?

I've seen this issue crop up a few times and nobody seems to want to take the blame.
cestuila
Mar 30		 Thanks for your optimistic perspective on my taxes!

Dell did honour the warranty when changing my HDD for a new one. Dell did not honor the sales contract in selling me a satisfying product. Had I known it would do "click click" all the time, I would have kept my good old Latitude D510!
I therefore expect them to look further since changing the HDD didn't solve the issue.
It's not as if I were and isolated case. You can have an idea of how many people are affected on the NotebookReview.com thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425 ) Loads of people!

I indeed hope this will be resolved in future products... Hopefully the new Latitude E6400 will not have this problem. But before buying an E6400 I will need to sell my D630. Who will want to buy my D630 if I tell them (yes, I tend to be honest and transparent about what I sell, as I would expect Dell to be transparent) that it's going to do "click click" all the time???

I cannot tell which component is at fault as I am a customer, NOT a Dell tech support person.
I believe it is not the HDD's fault, as this noise happens with various brands of HDD.
But I can't tell if it's the Bios, the firmware, the OS, the SATA controller...
cestuila
Mar 30		 Coud the people who demote please give an explanation?
Perhaps you might want to use my laptop for a week and see how annoying the noise can be before demoting...
cestuila
Mar 31		 One more thread on this issue today: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=235455< Hope Dell finds a solution soon...
jmxz
Apr 5		 The Correct Solution seems to me to be that the applications that keep accessing the disk should be fixed to not spin up the hard drive so often.

Especially for a laptop I *WANT* it to power down any hardware that's idle for too long; and if I'm running software that repeatedly re-spins-up the hard drives a few seconds after they get powered down, that's a bug with the software that should be fixed.

Voting down because Dell is doing the right thing - powering down and parking the hard drive on the laptops - and whatever software (some system logger? some indexing service? some email notification/alert thing?) that is spinning up the hard drive is to blame. If you can identify the software making those hard drive requests; perhaps post an Idea "Dell - work with the vendor of [whatever software is to blame] to stop spinning up the had drives unnecessarily".
cestuila
Apr 5		 I didn't expect to find people as egoistic as jmxz in this world :|

And if you had taken a couple of minutes to read some of the links above, you would have noticed that this issue happens whatever applications you install, whatever OS...

I had exactly the same softwares on my former D510 and didn't have any HDD noise!

Now, I will stop waisting my patience answering to someone as selfish...
But maybe I should actually thank you for explaining your (erroneous) reasons for demoting, not like the other ******** who demoted without even saying hello!

Now, yes, I might sound a bit bitter about this subject, but as I said earlier, you might want to have my laptop for a week and see how annoying the noise can be! Not to remind you that I paid more than $1000 for this laptop. Therefore, I thought it would work as you would expect a laptop to work (i.e: without the "tick tick" noise of a clock!)
aikiwolfie
Apr 5		 jmxz it's not a bug as such since the software is doing what it is supposed to do. It is bad programming though. What I would like to know is why this has suddenly become such a big issue. This must have been going on for years. Why is it suddenly such a hot topic for debate?
cestuila
Apr 5		 It has probably been going on for a couple of years. But until November 2007, I was still with my good old Latitude D510, and that one didn't do the click noise. Then, in November, I switched to the Latitude D630, which is a perfect laptop, apart from the click noise...

Many people say this is due to more aggressive management of energy allocated to the HDD. Don't know if this is true.
It maybe has something to do with the switching, in laptops, from ATA to SATA drives, don't know.
jmxz
Apr 5		 @cestuila:
A faint click noise - as mentioned - is when a drive is parking it's head, or getting it's head unparked. When unplugged, a laptop should do this when the drive is idle. When software decides to spin up the drive again (either by reading part of the disk that wasn't cached by the OS; or by forcing a write using fsync(), direct I/O, etc) it obviously has to unpark the drive. Some software does a good job minimizing this - some Linux distros copy themselves entirely to memory on boot up so disk access practically never happens for reads. Some linux distros have a laptop mode that buffers write()s for a very long time preventing the disk from spinning up even if you're saving many documents. Some software (syslog, postgres, etc) seem to break this by forcing write() system calls to spin up the disk using fsync() even when mostly idle.

If it's a very loud click - as you describe - it's quite possible you have a defective disk and could get a replacement under warranty. Check out any of the S.M.A.R.T diagnostics tools (which checks internal information that hard drives keep about their health including error rates, the number of times they've been spun down/up, temperature, etc) . If any of those are abnormal, you can use that to ask Dell to replace your hard drive for a (hopefully) quieter one.

@aikiwolfie:

My guess is that there are many factors.
1) more people using Ubuntu, which apparently has more people looking at the SMART data than Windows, so people started noticing the number of times the disk starts and stops.
2) more focus on power consumption (for environmental and battery life reasons), so people turn on more aggressive power management settings.
3) lots of hype thanks to blogs on the subject with too much drama in their titles.
4) apparently some drives with a very loud "click" when they park/unpark - perhaps this has something to do with the model, or if it's as bad as cestuila makes it sound, perhaps a defective drive.
cestuila
Apr 5		 The click is indeed noisy enough to be heard by someone who would be 2-3 meters away from the laptop.
As I said, this is not due to a defective drive as:
- I am not loosing data
- Dell has changed my drive once already, and the issue is still the same
- many people have the same problem with different drives of different capacities and different brands.

Now, it is not my job to find out if it's Samsung's firmware or Dell SATA controller, or Dell's bios that is making my hard drive park its heads too often (and noisily), that's why I'm asking Dell tech support to look at it at once. My tech support contact at Dell didn't even know what a Hybrid HDD is, that's why I'm posting here, hoping some sufficiently skilled person reads this. But with your "help", this might never happen...

And just to let you know, putting the disk in any mode in the bios (Quiet / high performance...) hasn't solved the issue. And the main solution adopted by Windows users is installing NHC, which is not a true solution as explained above...
cestuila
Apr 5		 As to your "hype" comment, I can tell you that I have not totally gone mad yet, therefore I can tell you that my D510 did not do that noise, whereas newer laptops, like my D630, do that noise.


Just in case you were thinking the noise came from my own mind, and that I was posting this suggestion here... just coz it looks "hype"...
aikiwolfie
Apr 5		 cestuila you really need to calm down and take what's being said on the forum less personally. The "hype" comment wasn't directed at you personally. Nobody denies this problem exists. Well with the possible exception of Dell.
cestuila
Apr 5		 If jmxz (and the other demoters) doesn't deny the problem, I believe he had no reason to demote the article...

Sorry if I sound "uncalm"... I'm not writing in CAPSLOCK though ;)
And I would probably be even calmer if I wasn't personnally affected by the people demoting this idea...
aikiwolfie
Apr 5		 Demotion or promotion is the voters choice. As I said you need to take it less personally. If there's no fault with Dell hardware or drivers why should Dell fix it? I think this is the angle the demoters are looking at things from.
cestuila
Apr 5		 Has Dell proven it's not it's SATA controller nor its bios's fault? No, since they haven't communicated at all about this issue.

And still, I'm a Dell customer, not a Samsung customer. Therefore, whatever the HDD they choose to put in my laptop, I still expect my laptop to have Latitude quality!
jmxz
Apr 5		 @cestuila: "Now, it is not my job to find out if it's Samsung's firmware or Dell SATA controller, or Dell's bios that is making my hard drive park its heads too often (and noisily),"

I'm still strongly suspecting that it's more that software is _un_parking it too often.

@aikiwolfie: "If there's no fault with Dell hardware or drivers why should Dell fix it? I think this is the angle the demoters are looking at things from."

Yeah, that's pretty much the angle I'm coming from. It feels to me the hardware & bios & drivers are working "correctly" in that they park the heads on laptops when the drives are Idle for some period of time.

If we're basically asking Dell to look for software vendors that supply software that doesn't try to poll the disk as frequently when the machine's idle, I'm all for it; but when it comes to patching Ubuntu or Windows (or more likely whatever user-space software's silly enough to ask the OS to spin up the disk so often) that seems more like it should be posted on those company's ideastorm equivalents.
aikiwolfie
Apr 5		 So far as anybody has been able to establish so far cestuila, the hardware is working fine and the drivers are working fine. They do what they're supposed to do.
cestuila
Apr 6		 It seems I could repeat it 20 times and jmxz wouln't understand. I didn't have that issue with my former Dell laptop, although I had the same use of it.

As for " the hardware is working fine", look at the pdf of the Latitude D630. There is no place where it says "expect your HDD to do "click click" every now and then"... So of course, if it's the firmware, the driver or the bios, it's not exactly the hardware that's at fault, but come on, be honest at least: it's not working "fine"!
aikiwolfie
Apr 6		 What software are you running on your laptop?
cestuila
Apr 6		 Windows XP and Firefox, and sometimes, some Office software (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), and messenging software.

But, there's an important thing I've omitted to mention so far: I can hear the click even before Windows loads, i.e: when the bios is loading when I switch my laptop on.
aikiwolfie
Apr 6		 Well omitting important details like that just gets you a pile of aggravation.

Support Tip: Provide all important details upfront! We can't help if you don't tell!
cestuila
Apr 6		 Sorry, it is probably indeed an important fact.
crocours
Apr 6		 I of course promote this. I've a D830 and I immediatly noticed this horrible "click" problem, under XP and Ubuntu. I exepect DELL to answer to this problem rapidly, I bougth a quality laptop to have quality, not this kind of problem.

@jmxz : I want to thank you for your vote down.
aikiwolfie
Apr 6		 Well at least he took the time of day to look at the idea and vote. How many folks just passed it by?
cestuila
Apr 6		 Well, it's probably better if they pass it by than demote, no?
aikiwolfie
Apr 6		 Depends on what their interest in the matter is. Maybe if Dell spend resources on this issue they won't have the resources to devote to another idea. Dell are a big global company. But their funds aren't limitless. You need to appreciate this is IdeaStorm where every bodies ideas are competing for attention. To some people your clicky hard drive just isn't that important.
cestuila
Apr 6		 Of course the "click click" noise is not important to them if their suggestion is "I want 3 eSATA ports on my next Dell laptop" for example.

But I wonder how they'll feel once they have a super dooper Dell laptop with 3 eSATA ports... if that laptop's HDD does a horrible "click click" noise!

Now let's face it, this suggestion is NOT incompatible with having a great laptop with 3 eSATA port. The only reason it may be, is that it will cost Dell a little to work with Samsung & others to solve the issue, but if you read the notebookreview thread linked above, you can see that it's more than 1 customer who will benefit from this solving of the issue.
aikiwolfie
Apr 6		 Dude if you want Dell to fix this issue then you need to get on Dells nerves. Not IdeaStorm members. We didn't break your laptop.
jmxz
Apr 6		 My vote down is because as far as I can tell, everything seems to be working as designed -- or at least there's little evidence that there's anything wrong.

Do you want Dell to look for hard drive vendors that have quieter parking drives? Recommend such a vendor in an Idea and I'd vote it up? But since I don't know if one exists, I doubt such an idea is practical.

Do you want Dell to set their BIOS to prevent drives from parking - and therefore save less power with well-behaved software? I'd vote it down too.

I'm not sure what other options are - but if you have an Idea that proposes a solution, I'd be interested to know what it is.
cestuila
Apr 7		 @ wikiwolfie: sorry if I'm getting on your nerves. Not intended. I'm just answering to people who are saying that the noise is sort of my fault/not existant / normal / whatever... when I paid more than $1000 on a laptop that I expected to work fine, and not replace my kitchen clock in terms of "tick tick" sound...

@jmxz: " Do you want Dell to look for hard drive vendors that have quieter parking drives? Recommend such a vendor in an Idea and I'd vote it up? But since I don't know if one exists, I doubt such an idea is practical."
As I said before, my previous Dell laptop didn't have this problem, so it's not as if I was asking for something impossible.

Of course the heads have to park to save energy and protect them in case of shock/falling down. But the heads do NOT have to do an awful "click" sound when they park.

My idea would be:
- switch laptops on before you put them on sale to check if they do aweful unexpected noises
- work with you tech teams, with HDD manufacturers and with SATA controllers manufacturers and with OS manufacturers if necessary. But as I've said, I already had XP SP2 on my previous Latitude D510 and I didn't have that noise, furthermore the noise can happen even when in the bios.
aikiwolfie
Apr 7		 Nobody said the noise is your fault. What people have said is that the jury is still out. Nobody has been able to pin down what causes it. They have then given their opinions. As I said before. Take the things that are being said less personally.
ryaske
Apr 7		 <font>No one has posted a link of what this sounds like? Its like an old grandfather clock that ticks irregularly ... it is THE most annoying sound that any laptop has made since I started using computers decades ago.

Its a click , followed by a clack. This repeats almost once every 2 minutes , sometimes less , but only when idling. I DO NOT notice the hard drivce light blink while I hear the sound. If the hard drive light IS blinking, the click clack is non exisitant. I cannot hear the hard drive spinning down or spinning up .. and thats an obvious sound. It is just the read head doing something .. I would guess parking while the platters still spin.

IT IS DRIVING ME INSANE. I will post today an mp3/wav of exactly what it sounds like on both dell forums and notebookreview .. If you are suffering for the problem please look for my post and confirm the sound we are al experiencing is the same! THEN LETS FIND, CREATE, or DEMAND A FIX
aikiwolfie
Apr 7		 If i were to ask the question does it sound like an old floppy disk drive? Would that make sense?
cestuila
Apr 7		 Thank you for your message ryaske.
I agree with all your comments. Except one thing:
"only when idling" --> For example: I use Firefox. When I have been reading a webpage for a while (therefore, heads have probably gone to idling position I suppose), then I click a link on that page. This will open a new Tab. And when doing that, I sometimes hear my HDD do that "click click" sound...

@aikiwolfie: a bit like a floppy disk drive, but shorter. More like an old clock, just like ryaske says actually. I wish you never to have to hear it on your own laptop.
jmxz
Apr 7		 @aikiwolfie:
I'm guessing you can hear the sound they're talking about with the command:
sudo hdparm -y /dev/hda
When I do this, I get a "chunk; pckew" like sound and "hdparm -C /dev/hda" will probably report that the drive is then in the "standby" state. On a different drive I get a quieter "ch-ching ; wheee" like sound with that command. On some of my drives -y ("standby mode") is louder, on some -Y ("sleep mode") is louder. This seems surprising to me; but seems reproducable.
aikiwolfie
Apr 7		 Sounds like cheap mechanical parts to me. I'm better some of Dells hard drive suppliers are cutting corners.
jmxz
Apr 8		 @aikiwolfie: "Sounds like cheap mechanical parts to me."
Server components are sometimes loud too; since in a rack of servers you wouldn't care. But yeah, we're not likely to be seeing server parts in laptops.
cestuila
Apr 8		 Indeed, I wouldn't mind if my laptop was in a rack / cupboard... but that's not exactly the purpose of a laptop...
ryaske
Apr 9		 @jmxz:
You were on to something!!! In fact I used a couple of the terms you just mentioned in my endless pursuit for a solution. In fact .. just today:

@those suffering this problem;
I HAVE FOUND THE CAUSE AND THE SOLUTION!!!!
:)

___OK GUYS I FIXED IT!!

first off let me give some background..

I first successfully used the "Notebook Hardware Control" app.
It has a section for Hard disk settings.
Here I noticed there are TWO different settings for most harddrives:
Advanced Acousitic Management
and Advanced POWER Managmeent!!
(I wrongly assumed the setting in the bios for acoustic would be the only settingw e could change.)

For APM , there are a few options:
1 Enabled Spin Down
128 Without Spin Down
254 Max Performance
196 custom

Apparently are drives are set by efault to 128 (which pretty much just PARKS the head to save power (and to protect the drive if you are to drop it)). This is the sound we are hearing, like i thought

So in NHC, I changed it to 254 .. and VOILA the click was INSTANTLY gone~!!!!

But I was not satisifed with running this 3rd party app all the time in order to stop the click .. so I set out to find a better solution...

I tried using the Hitatchi feature tool to change the setting in the drive... but after burning a booty disc and trying to change the APM setting, it told me "the advanced power management setting cannot be changed with this program". AHH!

remembering the solutions I saw for users of linux (ubuntu specificly) .. they used the HDPARM tool to set a new value for Advanced Power Management in the drive .. they were setting it manually to 254 and solving the problem.

so that brings me to THE KEY.....

I searched "hdparm for windows" in google

And found this artile:
http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/03/hdparm_for_windows.html

it turns out someone has made an EXE of the same tool so that windows users can change the APM on the drive

so I searched more, found the tool
(get http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/)

install,
open cmd window,
navigate to directory it is installed in,
run this command:
hdparm.exe -B 254 hda

and bam .. the problem is gone.
Now, note that your battery will slightly be affected because the head is NOT parking anymore (lower power state). But .. the sound is gone so I am fine with that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you can make a simple bat file with these lines:
@echo off
"C:\Program Files\hdparm\bin\hdparm.exe" -B 254 hda

And just run that whenever you can't stand the clicking.

I find this the best comprimse .. because I want my data to be safe if I were to drop the Laptop (the head _might_ be parked if set to the default 127 APM mode), and it also saves on battery for when I'm out and about and the clicking doesnt bother me. When I can stand it , I just run that bat file via a shortcut in my quicklaunch .. and *poof* problem is gone until next restart, reboot, or hibernate.

And to think that DELL had no idea this solution exisit .. I hope they see this thread so other customers won't have to suffer this electronic chinese torture!!!
___

for more info on the problem .. see this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3220075
ryaske
Apr 9		 also in that last link i posted, the user "Deadsimple" created a script that will automatically run hdparm and reset the drive to 127 whenever you reboot, restart, or hibernate. So use that if you ALWAYS want the clicking gone.
cestuila
Apr 10		 Thanks for this although it doesn't solve 3 issues (HDD always running --> lower battery life, increased noise/heat, no data protection as heads don't park).

I haven't understood one thing: 254 is the setting that enables you to have the heads never park, right?
And 127-128 enables energy saving hence heads parking, right?
If so, can you explain why you say "reset the drive to 127 whenever you reboot, restart, or hibernate. So use that if you ALWAYS want the clicking gone." ?
I would understand 127 makes the heads park when idle.
Maybe you meant 254 instead of 127 in that sentence, or maybe I misunderstood something.
jmxz
Apr 10		 @ryaske:

Nice! That's one of the best explanations of the problem I've read anywhere.
If you have your own blog somewhere you should post it there. No doubt that'd be a popular article.

@cestuila: "Maybe you meant 254 instead of 127 in that sentence, or maybe I misunderstood something."

I was thinking the same thing. I kinda thought that different models of hard drives had different possible settings; so perhaps 127 works on one particular model.

@cestuila: "although it doesn't solve 3 issues .. HDD always running --> lower battery life, increased noise/heat,

Indeed - but if you're software is accessing the hard drive so often that you were hearing clicking frequently on an idle machine -- that means your disk was frequently in use anyway - and that in turn means you had those problems anyway.
cestuila
Apr 19		 Guess what??
After 3 months of use, my clicking HDD is almost dead! (yes I have tried various of the unsatisfactory "solutions" mentionned on the web).
This is all logical, since my HDD is having much more cycles than it should.

Why am I posting this today? Here it comes:
I was just browsing the internet, suddenly, Windows XP SP2, one of the most stable OS out there, started freezing. At the same time, my HDD started doing that "click" sound, but about twice a second; during about 20 seconds (wonder how many more cycles I just lost!)... and... then came a blue screen! (something I hadn't seen since I switched to XP in 2002) Telling me Windows was being shut to prevent data loss or whatever...

So now I have rebooted Windows and am running the HDD scanning tool... and this might help... until my next freeze...

Yes, I will call Dell tech support for a new HDD, but that means I have to format the old one, and install everything I need on the new one... which I do NOT have the time to do every 2 months!!! (note that the current HDD is already the second one on my D630)....

DELL PLEASE DO SOMETHING!
jmxz
Apr 19		 This is sounding to me more like a defective hard drive, and perhaps something other than parking causing the clicking.

I can't think of a good reason for clicking happening twice a second otherwise.
cestuila
Apr 19		 I'll just get a 3rd HDD from Dell, and it will probably have the same problem, and then I'll get a fourth one... or not! I hope I'll have changed laptop by then! But I still wonder who will buy this current faulty laptop from me... :s
cestuila
May 20		 Just to give a litlle update:

I have finally found the time to contact Dell to change my faulty Samsung HDD (that was already a replacement for a previous faulty Samsung HDD). I called them yesterday, and got a replacement HDD today.
The smile appeared on my face when I opened the box and noticed the HDD was a Hybrid Seagate HDD this time!
And the smile hasn't come of my face for the whole day! I've now installed WIndows and used my laptop all afternoon... not a single "click click" sound!

Conclusion:
- Seagate still knows how to make efficient HDDs
- Samsung HDDs s*ck (or at least, the HM12HII model stinks)
- the problem was probably hardware related, as I knew since the beginning. What I couln't tell yet, is that it was HDD related.

Thanks for reading, and good luck to those who:
- still have the "click click" noise
- or are using some weird home made software as a creepy """solution""".
aikiwolfie
May 21		 I'm starting to think this clicking noise has been their all along and people just haven't noticed it before. I was sitting deleting stuff from my MP3 player. It's a HDD model and for once i wasn't plugged into the headphones with the volume turned up full blast. Every time I deleted a file the hard drive would spin up with a whirring sound and a "click click" and then spin down again. The MP3 player works just fine otherwise.

I know it doesn't help Windows users but Intel produces a sweet little app called "powertop" that will fix this problem on Linux notebooks. The best part is it's in the Ubuntu repositories.
jmxz
May 21		 @aikiwolfie:

It sounds to me like it's a combination of 3 problems here.

1. I think cestuila really did have a broken drive that made some sort of clicking (perhaps parking; perhaps just seeking wildly) absurdly often regardless of the software settings. He wrote "At the same time, my HDD started doing that "click" sound, but about twice a second; during about 20 seconds" which sounds far worse than parking. I had an old drive that would click a lot, and each time it clicked I got a "hdf: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }", in the log file. Perhaps some drives park/unpark when they get an error in an attempt to reset themselves?

2. Yes, when drives park and unpark, people could hear it all along "sudo hdparm -y /dev/hda " or "sudo hdparm -Y /dev/hda" on Ubuntu if you want to hear it yourself. I think the reason people haven't noticed is that I think many older systems (windows and linux alike) were so bad at powermangement they barely tried to park drives.

3. "powertop...will fix" I'd still say "workaround" or "provide insight to help people eventually fix" would be a better phrase. IMHO the problem is too many apps (gnome, firefox, postres, syslog, etc) spin up the drives on idle machines for rather lame reasons. powertop will help point fingers at sloppy software; but it'll be a long time before it's fixed.

Anyway! I'm very happy Dell fixed this for cestuila.

@cestuila: "and good luck to those who:- still have the "click click" noise - or are using some weird home made software as a creepy """solution"""."

I certainly hear the "click" when my drive parks and unparks; but considering I have 8 different model drives in this room and they all make some sort of click when they park/unpark. I agree that the software workaround I'm using is "creepy" and is just a workaround, not a real "solution"; but it stops the drive from parking/unparking (and clicking) when plugged in. When not plugged in, the drive (IMHO correctly) parks itself when idle; but as everyone observes, unparks frequently when running something in my GUI desktop. I still haven't nailed down exactly what it is; but if/when I do, I'll hope to give that back to whichever packages keep spinning up my drives when idle.
aikiwolfie
May 21		 Powertop doesn't just point the finger. It can adjust the interval with which these apps are waking up the drive for lame reasons or completely disable them.
jmxz
May 22		 Fascinating. Off to install powetop now.
meretare
Jun 5		 As seems to be clear enough from the notebook review threead posted above, this seems to be a power management settings issue. If the power management settings mean the drive heads constantly park, the battery lasts longer, and it can be advertised as such. I have a Samsung laptop, with a Samsung harddrive unsurprisingly, and I have this issue along with loads of other people with many different makes of laptop and HDD. None of the methods suggested have worked - it is almost as if the settings are hardwired in - and it can be very annoying.
cestuila
Jun 6		 *Agrees with meretare*

However, note that I now have a Seagate HDD and I can only hear those "clicks" in a very silent room and when paying A LOT of attention, in comparison to the noisy former Samsung HDD I used to have...
aikiwolfie
Jun 6		 Perhaps you should experiment with Linux and Powertop to see what sort of results you get.
austinio
Jun 30		 Bought a Vostro 1500 laptop last month (May '08) and in the first day heard what sounded like someone cracking a nut with a nutcracker coming from inside the case. Out of the blue and LOUD - happened a few times, hours between each time. Also, lots of click-click and crackling sounds, typically about 10 seconds apart. Those happened all the time. Tech support said was a bad hard drive and after I refused a refurbished one (for a brand new machine???) sent me a new 1500.

Well... no loud cracking nut sound, but the new one still has continual click-clicks and running the drive, WITH a disconcerting click/pop (like a somewhat quieter sound of the hard drive shutting off when powering down). That click/pop can happen once per minute and always makes me think it's gone kaput, but it hasn't. Just each time makes me think it's finally going...what the heck is the deal? Never had any of that happen with my old Inspiron or any other computer I've used. Dell...get a grip and fix it, dump the hard drive manufacturer, or figure out what's wrong!

Are these the sounds others are hearing? Could they be from something else - not the hard drive?
nickhollingsworth
3 days ago		 I have the same ticking issue on a Dell Vostro 1700. It ticks roughly every 30 seconds when on mains power and more than once a second when on battery. Its a real 'ticking' noise and loud enough very irritating to other people in a quiet room (as several people have pointed out to me). Its been there since I got the machine and is the same under Vista and Ubuntu. Its not a normal working disk noise that you might hear on any make of laptop. To the person who asked if its like the noise of an floppy having its cover opened - yep that's the sort of noise or like the insistent ticking of an old clock.
jmxz
3 days ago		 @nickholingsworth: "than once a second when on battery. ... and Ubuntu"

Try "hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" and "hdparm -M 254 /dev/sda" and see if the clicking goes away. If it does we can help add stuff to your startup scripts to make the fix permanent.
nickhollingsworth
3 days ago		 Yep. Based on the posts above I used hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda and it did the trick.

This is what I did http://notatplay.blogspot.com/2008/07/ticking-dell-laptop-its-power-saving.html

As I say in the above post I don't think the machine resets on a reboot - at least it hasn't on a test restart I did earlier.

I didn't bother with the hdparm -M because I was pretty confident the issue was power saving behaviour and not just noise from normal disk activity.

I don't now how to get the power saving info for a drive only how to set as above. Any ideas?
nickhollingsworth
2 days ago		 Correction to above. The changed settings only survived a restart. After turning machine off and rebooting it later the settings have reverted and the tick is back.
aikiwolfie
2 days ago		 Short term fix. Create an empty file and put those commands in it. Give that file execution privileges and add it to the auto startup list in the session manager.
jmxz
2 days ago		 or put that script in /etc/rc2.d/S99fix_my_hard_drive_power_management
aikiwolfie
2 days ago		 umm ... yeah what he said. :op
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