T4220's hard drive hiccups

[Mistah_C]

Hey everybody
My T4220's hard drive started making this weird hiccup noise every now and then- usually when it idles. I just wanted to post this up and ask if anyone has had this experience with their unit because I'm afraid of what I've read about hard drive noises and God forbid, hard drive failure- although its a brand new computer and everything else is working just great (although I do hear the fan come on much more than it used to and its louder). Does anyone else hear this in their T4220 and am I just taking nothing and making it a big issue?

Thanks!

[acidrain]

I have had the blue Screen like 5-6 times by now and had to do a data delete and System restore. Fujitsu has already asked me to send the tablet for a check up of the hard drive. The SD card slot makes the 0S freeze whenever I put an SD card in.

[rhalin]

I've heard this in a few laptops before. My Dell currently does this on an upgraded drive (samsung, 5400rpm, 30GB) when idle. Sometimes bios updates can fix the "problem," and sometimes it won't go away until you get a different drive. (notebookreview.com has several threads on this).

As near as I can tell, in some cases it's caused when the harddrive goes idle to save battery life and some windows process kicks it back on to find something.

Now, whether or not this is caused by a damaged drive, I couldn't say for sure. Some of them I've seen have been fine mechanically, as well as had no bad sectors or performance trouble and lasted years as well. On the other hand, I've seen a couple of them go downhill very quickly (days or weeks).

Honestly, clicking sounds are best not ignored. You should probably call Fujitsu support and see if they've encountered the problem or can offer a solution.

[mludwig]

If you have a Hitachi hard drive, they are known for being noisy (clicky) during seek. You could try Hitachi's Feature Tool to enable acoustic management on the drive. While you are there, you could also try Drive Fitness Tool to test if it is going downhill.
As always, backup, backup, backup.

[P8RSON]

Hitachi drives can be noisy... So much so Fujitsu Siemens decided to ditch them and use Seagate drives instead.

[aajeev]

I have had the blue Screen like 5-6 times by now and had to do a data delete and System restore. Fujitsu has already asked me to send the tablet for a check up of the hard drive. The SD card slot makes the 0S freeze whenever I put an SD card in.

That's interesting I had the same problem as well. In the first seven days I had about 2 blue screen, did a system restore back to XP then had 2 more blue screen then I went back to Vista again (I started with Vista) then blue screen again..I thought it was a memory problem because the harddrive checked up ok with some software i ran. Could this actually be a harddrive problem? I kept on thinking it was a memory problem so I ask to send it back for a replacement...(I didn't wants to go through a fix up because I didn't spent $1800+ just so that after 3 weeks it can become a refurbish one....)

[Leon]

I have a similar issue (clicking) with my T4215 120 Gb hard disk. However, I have no crashes. I have just repartitioned the drive and also defragged it. It's quiet now... I have nevertheless arranged with Fujitsu to pick the Tablet up.

[rhalin]

That's interesting I had the same problem as well. In the first seven days I had about 2 blue screen, did a system restore back to XP then had 2 more blue screen then I went back to Vista again (I started with Vista) then blue screen again..I thought it was a memory problem because the harddrive checked up ok with some software i ran. Could this actually be a harddrive problem? I kept on thinking it was a memory problem so I ask to send it back for a replacement...(I didn't wants to go through a fix up because I didn't spent $1800+ just so that after 3 weeks it can become a refurbish one....)

Yeah, it's possible that the crashing is because of the harddrive. A bad sector can cause bluescreens during normal use (especially on XP and vista with the background defragging they do). In those cases, you'll usually hear a click or two right before the blue screen (but not always). If you don't hear a click, or other strange harddrive noise, then it very well may be a memory problem.

You might want to try to run a full scan disk to detect and repair bad sectors. I don't know what software you ran, but a disk check that detects and repair bad sectors on a laptop harddrive will generally take half an hour, or up to a couple hours depending on the size of the drive. If what you ran went very quickly, chances are it didn't check everything it needed to.

Out of curiosity, what version of Windows are you running, XP or Vista?

[aajeev]

Out of curiosity, what version of Windows are you running, XP or Vista?

I had the tablet for a total of 20 something days. I ran Vista, XP, then Vista for about the same amount of time....