Problem with hard drive clicking

Many users have reported a problem with hard drive clicking, particularly with Hitachi's 5k80 series which currently ships with new T series Thinkpads. The clicks occur rapidly, and are quiet but noticeable. The clicks seem to happen when the drive is idle. Some users report that defragmenting their drive helps. Others recommend using Hitachi's drive feature tool to increase the acoustic management level, and/or set power management settings.

Some other users report that nothing they try has solved the clicking problem. It is not known whether the problem is a sign of impending drive failure. Since the problem is so prevalent, if it turns out to coincide with high drive failure rates then Hitachi has another major drive quality problem to deal with, after the Deskstar 75GXP problem.

IBM's latest posted firmware, A5DA, does not appear to solve the problem.

Possible cause

Laptop drives (especially Hitachi 5K80, 5K100 - included SAMSUNG MP0804H) can unload heads very often, and they can produce a noticeable click when doing that. Some ThinkPad BIOSes can be very eager to program the HD Advanced Power Management feature (hdparm -B) even when told to always keep the HD in "Maximum Performance mode" and will do so every time AC state changes, and when coming out of suspend (be it S3 or S4). Unless you reset the HD's APM mode, it will unload its heads eventually thus producing the clicks.

Tracking down the cause of the clicks

Using "smartctl -A", it is possible to check if any of the drive's attributes related to platter spin-up/down or head unload are increasing when a click is heard. That can help pinpointing the cause of the clicks.

Possible solution (Linux)

The clicking noise apparently occurs when the drive is parking its heads (and ramping them off the drive surface in the process) after a timeout after the last disk access. Try turning off power management for the drive; that should stop the drive from parking the heads except when turning off:

# hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda

You can also try

# hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda

which doesn't turn power management off, but is the least agressive setting. So far, that has solved my problem with the disk clicking on my G41, with a HTS548080M9AT00 drive. That, I presume, is an Hitachi. Update: I now use -B 255. The clicking seemed to return in some circumstances with 254.

Possibly no solution?

I have a Thinkpad X41, which has a 60GB Hitachi C4K60 (HTC426060G9AT00) harddrive, with the clicking problem (even in Windows). The problem is indeed caused by the harddrive parking the heads when idle, and the Load_Cycle_Count SMART statistic can be seen increasing when the clicks occur.

Any hdparm -B settings did not seem to help, so I checked the harddrives specs (available in hitachigst.com). Setting the APM mode off (hdparm -B 255) sets it actually to the lowest APM mode (the same as hdparm -B 254), and even the lowest APM mode unloads the heads very aggressively causing the clicking sounds. Another problem is that the drive is rated only for 600000 unload/load cycles, which means that the drive will break in at most a couple of years.

NOTE!

This observation is only about the specific harddrive model (Hitachi C4K60), there may be hope for other Thinkpad models with different harddrives.

NOTE!

A week ago I had to replace my original Hitachi 80G drive (IC25N080ATMR04-0, R51 1830-DG4) due to a rapidly increasing bad block count and resulting file system failures on gentoo linux (2.6.16). I'm not sure about the actual reason for the drive failure, but maybe the drive could no longer stand this summer's heat.

For there was no time to do in depth investigations, I quickly bought a Samsung MP0804H 80G disk from the nearest computer shop, transfered data and system files to the new disk, and so successfully revived my beloved notebook. I was just starting to relax when the drive began to emit annoying "clicks" every 5-10 seconds -- when idle.

For this is a known (thinkwiki) problem I tried all the "hdparm" settings suggested here, updated the Thinkpad BIOS, adjusted the BIOS power management options, ... but without luck until tonight ... when I found out -- by pure luck -- that the "clicking noise" can be immediately stopped just by enabling "automatic offline tests" using

smartctl -o on /dev/hda  

Even more strange is that SMART wasn't enabled by default, although the drive supports it. It's surely unreasonable to suspect that disabling SMART was by intention, i. e. to hide the fact that the drive performed 15.539 load cycles (out of 600.000) within only one week?

Note that enabling smart (-s on) without enabling "offline tests" -- which is what I did immediately after observing the "clicks" -- did not solve the problem for me, but made it quite clear that this drive was "badly in need of some help". :-)

Another Possible Solution

IBM, when notified about this occurance, may replace the drive with a Fujitsu 5k 80GB hard drive, as to them the sound is indicative of a potential hard drive failure.

External links

• Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Downloads - The drive feature tool may help with this problem.
• Thread on thinkpads.com
• Thread on notebookforums.com
• Thread on silentpcreview.com
• Another Thread on thinkpads.com
• Thread on tabletpcbuzz.com
• German Thread on thinkpad-forum.de (Containing an interesting remark about a possible problem with the Cache)