Gone Posted February 2, 2011 Share Posted February 2, 2011 So I just bought my new laptop (HP G62-371DX), and I love the darn thing. I have no problems, however: If I leave the computer idling without any disk activity, there is a clicking noise. I narrowed it down to the hard drive, and my guess is its the head parking and then going back into motion. I called HP and they told me to runa disk diagnostic in the bios, which said the disk is perfectly fine. I used Western Digitals disk health program as well, same results. S.M.A.R.T. data as far as I see shows no problems, so my concern is: Do you believe I have a faulty hard disk, or is there some setting I can unleash within Windows 7 that reduces the head parking? There are no driver or firmware updates for the disk, and I really don't want to have to return the computer and wait another week to get a different one in, especially if I have the same problem (its my only computer, and my only form of entertainment besides my kindle :blush: ) Any tips? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MR_Candyman Posted February 2, 2011 Share Posted February 2, 2011 You can set the computer to not turn off the hard drive when idle in the power management options in windows. Also, if it's a Western Digital Green drive, then you're SOL as they will always park the drive (this is why I never buy them) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gone Posted February 2, 2011 Author Share Posted February 2, 2011 My power settings have drive on at all times, but its a WD Scorpio 5000BEVT drive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HawkMan Posted February 2, 2011 Share Posted February 2, 2011 if you have the click of death for some other reason than head parking, then diagnostics and smart usualy won't show any problems untill the drive is dead or nearly so anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iKenndac Posted February 2, 2011 Share Posted February 2, 2011 My power settings have drive on at all times, but its a WD Scorpio 5000BEVT drive Yup, I have one of those and it does the same. In my Mac, I run a little program at boot that sends an ATA command to the drive to tell it to use a less aggressive power saving mode (see the -B flag at http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm). Unfortunately the drive forgets this when the computer is powered off, which is why the program has to be run at boot. I'm not sure how you'd do the same in Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pikey Posted February 9, 2011 Share Posted February 9, 2011 There's a big thread about this on the WD forums .. although you might not have a 'green' drive , it explains a lot. http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Green-Caviar-High-Load-Cycle-Cout-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731 I think the point is your laptop is parking the drive head when it can to try and save power .. battery life etc. On some WD green drives you can change the settings with wdidle3 .. but it's a firmware update for those drives! wdidle3 .. firmware update Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Topham Hatt Posted February 11, 2011 Share Posted February 11, 2011 I have two of these drives. Strangely one does park the head but the other onedoesn't :s I'll run the update anyway as I'd rather them be on than ruining the drive. However, will it magically delete any of the data on the drive? It'll annoy me if so as I have just spent hours putting Gb's of data on it :/ However I am confused: 3. Extract wdidle3.exe onto a bootable medium (floppy, CD-RW, network drive, etc.). 4. Boot the system with the hard drive to be updated to the medium where the update file was extracted to. 5. Run the file by typing wdidle3.exe at the command prompt and press enter. 3 - extract it to a removable USB drive - CHECK 4 - So restart but don't let it run Windows? But set the USB drive as the boot drive? 5 - If there's no Windows, I guess I have a command prompt? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chconline Veteran Posted February 12, 2011 Veteran Share Posted February 12, 2011 It's fine -- if you're concerned you can change the drive idle parameters like others have said, but I have the BEVT installed in my Lenovo T400 for quite a while now and it's not a big issue other than the occasional head locking sound. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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