Hard Disk clicking sound whilst idle

English Hardware
#1

I can frequently hear a short clicking sound emanating from my hard disk. This only seems to happen whilst it is idle. (I don’t get this sound when booting to windows vista). Are there are any possible solutions to this?

Thanks

#2

Forgot to add:

Linux 2.6.31.12-0.2-desktop i686
Opensuse 11.2
Kde 4.4.2

The laptop is a dell inspiron 1520 model with a samsung hard drive

#3

On 03/30/2010 03:36 PM, Anonymous1986 wrote:
>
> Forgot to add:
>
> Linux 2.6.31.12-0.2-desktop i686
> Opensuse 11.2
> Kde 4.4.2
>
> The laptop is a dell inspiron 1520 model with a samsung hard drive

I think your hard drive is dying. Be sure you have backups.

#4

I did contemplate that initially, but I ran some checks on my hard drive and it passed them all. Additionally, I never get the sound whilst using Vista.

I found this link but I’m not too sure if it’s relevant:
Problem with hard drive clicking - ThinkWiki

#5

Food for thought, if it does not occur in windows this would not be surprizing since windows almost continuously works the drive with scads of pending access functions. The drive as such never gets a chance to attempt a park or something similar.
At this time there is no direct or concise answer to the tick. Keep your options open is my best guess. Make sure to back-up to another drive not another partition of the same drive and try to monitor or note any unusual circumstances such as excessive drive ops during read writes, etc…

#6

Thanks for your reply.I’ve got an external hard drive on which I’ve backed up all my stuff. I just posted here to see if anyone else had a similar problem. The “click” is quite faint and hard to hear unless I’m in a very quiet area. I’ll monitor for anything unusual.

#7

Anonymous1986 wrote:
> I’ve got an external hard drive on which I’ve backed up all my stuff. I
> just posted here to see if anyone else had a similar problem. The
> “click” is quite faint and hard to hear unless I’m in a very quiet area.

then turn up the music! (and keep making backups)

–
palladium

#8

If it’s more of a ‘click, WHIRRRRRRRRrrrrrrr’ it’s just the hard disk powering down because it’s not been used for a while.
It’s quite noticeable when my Dell 1525 laptop does it :slight_smile:

#9

Update:

So I’ve installed Ubuntu 10.04, to try out the new beta and I do not get any clicking sounds from my hard drive whilst it is idle (tried out both kubuntu and ubuntu) which makes me think that it may be an opensuse issue. I’ve dug around google a bit and found this which seems to describe my problem:

Too much HDD activity - openSUSE Forums

Quote:

I have noticed that my OpenSuSE 11 x86_64 based laptop with KDE 3.5.9 sports too much HDD activity when it is idle (not even screensaver running). The majority of activities are short “bursts” with same sound pattern, occurring mostly with up to 15 seconds between the two, sometimes up to 45 seconds between two “bursts”.

Though the info posted there seems to be a bit too technical for me to understand. I performed a new opensuse installation yesterday and lo and behold the clicking sound reared it’s ugly head again.

Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated, in my opinion opensuse is a much better distro and I’d hate to stick to ubuntu/vista at home.

Thanks