Strange clicking sound from new laptop hard drive

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RubioV

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Dec 15, 2015
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Hi there,

I recently got a new Dell XPS laptop from my work. So far it's been running pretty ok, except the hard disk drive periodically makes a strange clicking sound. From the forum I see multiple posts indicating that the drive should be close to failure. However, I don't have any performance issues such as lag or hanging of the OS when the clicking occurs. SMART status is fine, with no errors at all, self tests come back good.

I would like to ask people who are more experienced with harddrive failures to listen to this audio clip. Is this sound an indication of imminent harddrive failure?

Drive information:
Model Family: HGST Travelstar Z5K1000
Device Model: HGST HTS541010A7E630
Serial Number: S04001SSH18SLF
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000cca 756ceacc3
Firmware Version: SE0OA4C0
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm
Form Factor: 2.5 inches

I can post the full SMART output if needed, but from what I can see there are no anomalies.

Thanks in advance!
Rubio
 
Solution
JaredDM
Hmm.... from the sound of it, I'd be a bit concerned. It's possible that it's a glitch telling the drive to suspend/sleep when it shouldn't be, I know some laptops have had such a glitch and it's usually fixed by a BIOS or UEFI update or even just changing settings in Windows about when to power down the HDD.

That or it could be that the drive is being under powered by a faulty power supply, which unfortunately you can't really change in a laptop. In either event I'd be sure to backup anything important you have on there, give it some time, and monitor the S.M.A.R.T. readout to see if you're developing reallocated or pending sectors.
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gbb0330

gbb0330

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Apr 28, 2015
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sounds like normal read/write operation to me.



 
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JaredDM

JaredDM

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Jul 8, 2015
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Hmm.... from the sound of it, I'd be a bit concerned. It's possible that it's a glitch telling the drive to suspend/sleep when it shouldn't be, I know some laptops have had such a glitch and it's usually fixed by a BIOS or UEFI update or even just changing settings in Windows about when to power down the HDD.

That or it could be that the drive is being under powered by a faulty power supply, which unfortunately you can't really change in a laptop. In either event I'd be sure to backup anything important you have on there, give it some time, and monitor the S.M.A.R.T. readout to see if you're developing reallocated or pending sectors.
 
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Solution
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RubioV

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Dec 15, 2015
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Thanks Jared, I think you've pointed me in the right direction. From a more thorough investigation of the S.M.A.R.T. parameters I have found a Load_Cycle_Count of 10663, which is very high for such a new hard drive. And after some browsing I found that some hard drives park their heads after only a few seconds of inactivity. From Wikipedia:
Some laptop drives and "green power" desktop drives are programmed to unload the heads whenever there has not been any activity for a very short period of time, such as about five seconds. <snip> As a result, there may be 100 or more load cycles per hour, and the load cycle rating may be exceeded in less than a year.
Click to expand...
This is most likely programmed into the hard drive firmware. I will try to disable this 'feature' and see if this fixes the issue.
Update: I can now confirm that the Load Cycle Count increases with each click of the drive, so these are indeed the heads being parked.
 
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