Clicking Sound of Hard Drive on Dell Notebook
Arrrrgh… It was like a torture! The harddrive in an only-few-days-old notebook (Dell Latitude D820) was producing an annoying clicking sound.
Click… 10 seconds…. CLICK…. 9 seconds…. CLICK
I had an idea.. CLICK probably the harddrive is parking its head (it remembered me a sound from a very old Seagate harddrive — the first one that parked its head itself — well, it was more like CLICK RATATATATATATATaaataaa…a…). CLICK.
Firstly I tried to play with hdparm -S253 /dev/sda
, but nothing CLICK helped. I tried to call hdparm -y /dev/sda
(put IDE drive in standby mode) and it produced exactly the same CLICK sound.
I tried to find anything on forums of Dell CLICK and Western Digital (the producer of my harddrive). Some harddrives were really broken, some of them CLICK needed a new firmware.
I started the setup of the notebook.. and… CLICK was there too! I was afraid that the harddrive is really broken. I started Windows… and the harddrive was silent!
So I checked the hdparm --help
and found a parameter CLICK that helped: :)))
Run this as root (/dev/sda
points to my harddrive):
-
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
You should see the following output:
-
/dev/sda:
-
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
[added on July 4, 2008]
To set this setting after every start of your notebook (for drive /dev/sda), add (or change) the following line to the /etc/conf.d/hdparm
file (Gentoo):
-
sda_args="-B 255"
Enjoy the silence :)