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Hard drive sounds

Last response: in Storage
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Hello Ive been hearing a clicking sound coming from my hard drive in my windows 7 laptop. I was just wondering if this is normal sound and how often it should be doing it if it is normal. It doesn't make the sound constantly just sometimes. I was thinking it could be the sound of the drive heads parking? but how often should it be doing that?

I have a short clip of the sound here:
http://youtu.be/m6aMF8II63I

I would also just like to note that I had my microphone right up against the case the sound is not that loud from a normal distance.

Thanks for your input! :D 

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pinecones88 -

Try this website for comparison - http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

I list that because we don't know what type of HDD you have (i.e., Toshiba, Maxtor, WD, etc..

The clip is really hard to distinguish the sound, and it really depends how old your drive is. I have a Win7 Bootcamp partition on a Mac that makes clicks about once a week if I am heavy computing, but if you run CHKDSK (Checkdisk) it should report if you have any errors. The drive on that machine (Toshiba) is just over a year old.

VV5 out.

It is a western digital wdc wd7500bpvt -80hxz. The laptop is just under a year old. All the SMART info in HD tune say OK. I am running the error scan now.

Ive also noticed that it seems like it only makes the sound when the system is idling or while I am doing something low intensity. Right now while running the error scan in HDtune I havent heard the sound once. Could it be some kind of power save feature?
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If it is not a constant noise you are fine. My current laptop drive has been clicking and groaning for over 2 years now.

If the performance of you machine has deteriorated to the point that it is annoying, then you may want to consider replacing it as that is not a good sign.

Some drives will perform an automatic internal background scan during idle periods.

As for head parking, you could check the Power On Hours Count and Load/Unload Cycle Count attributes in your SMART report. If the drive is autoparking too frequently, then you could try to select a less aggressive APM setting, or apply a firmware update, if available.
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