Arch Linux

perost

Member

Registered: 2007-01-23

Posts: 52

Loud click noise from harddrive

The harddrive in my laptop is making quite loud click-noises once in a while. The laptop is only a couple of months old, and in the beginning the clicks where very rare. But lately they've started to appear quite often, sometimes with only minutes between. It's not always that the clicks are so frequent, but sometimes. I haven't been able to discern a pattern, so I'm sorry for the somewhat fuzzy description. However, when I use the smartctl program to check the drives SMART values, I notice that the Load_Retry_Count value increases everytime the drive clicks. Right now the value is 480. I suspect that the click noise is the sound of the drive head parking, but I'm not sure. I'm using laptop-mode-tools, and I've tried to change some values in laptop-mode.conf, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

Is this normal or is something killing my drive. Or is the drive simply failing? I have a Samsung drive, which I've heard has a pretty high failrate when new. I would really appreciate some answers one this, so I can stop worrying about it. As I said the clicks are rather loud, and it doesn't sound healthy for the drive.

kumico

Member

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 224

Website

Re: Loud click noise from harddrive

sounds like th hd is dying .. maybe you should take up on your warrantee

fwojciec

Member

Registered: 2007-05-20

Posts: 1,411

Re: Loud click noise from harddrive

This is most likely what hd spindown sounds like.  You can try playing with hdparm -S and hdparm -B options to see if you can get it to stop completely.  On my hard drive I am only able to change the frequency of spindowns, I can't disable them completely (or at least I haven't figured out how yet) but you might have more luck.