Hitachi HD makes clicking noises. [Solved, sort of]

**e-schreiber** · 03-19-2012, 10:12 PM

I've been hearing clicking sounds coming from my TM2 since I got it 2 years ago. They have never bothered me much because they are hard to be noticed through my Koss Sparkplug earphones. Last week, the connector on the earphones got unreliable and that forced me to put them aside for a few days -- until the soldering Gods inspire me to fix it. The problem was, without the earphones, the clicking sounds suddenly became noticeable!

The noise comes from the Hitachi hard drive (500Gb, 72000 RPM), which has operated normally in any other respect. I have run the drive's SMART tests every quarter and the results have always been OK. I did a lot of a research on the subject and the almost-universal answer I found online was: "Drive is about to fail". Well, then it's been about to fail for 2 years.... The clicking noises happen sporadically, but only when the drive is idling. And it's just a few clicks, then the drive goes back to be 100% quiet again.

Luckily, I came across this post. To my surprise, HDs can produce clicking noises when their Power Saving configuration is set too strongly. So I did more research and found a "solution" to the problem: install HDTune and leave it idling in the background. It works and I have not noticed any drawbacks so far. Temperatures seem to be the same. Does anyone think this could cause some other problem in the future? Should I call HP and replace the drive?

**SDreamer** · 03-19-2012, 11:08 PM

It should be fine. My dv5t 1st gen does that, and it's about 4 years old already. Used to be my daily driver till early last year when I got my tm2. I don't know what drive it is, I think it's a Hitachi as well. That clicking noise is the head of the drive parking. From research, it technically could shorten the life of your hard drive from being overly aggressive. But I've also read that there is benefits from it though (can't remember what they were), that outweigh it. I wouldn't overly worry too much about it unless it really starts to sound nasty. I used to worry about it, but my dv5t is still going pretty strong.

**e-schreiber** · 04-08-2012, 02:11 PM

Strange thing. After I used HD Tune once, the drive stopped making the clicks. I haven't loaded that program in almost a month and the clicks went away. But I tried so many tricks to get rid of the noise that I'm not sure which trick really fixed the problem. That was the only thing bothering me about my TM2.

Hella machine!