Problem with hard drive clicking

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Many users have reported a problem with hard drive clicking, particularly with Hitachi Travelstar 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 Hitachi Travelstar 5K80, Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 and 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: it will still unload heads, but far less often. The drives are prepared to withstand a great number of head unloads (200k unloads are typical, Hitachi drives tolerate about 600k unloads).

These commands have immediate effect, and need to be re-issued at every boot, after resuming from disk or RAM, and after hotswapping. You have to reissue the -B commands every time the ThinkPad BIOS might have tried to override them.

Possibly no solution?

Hitachi C4K60 (HTC426060G9AT00)

On a Thinkpad X41 with a has a 60GB Hitachi C4K60 (HTC426060G9AT00) hard-disk that had the clicking problem (even in Windows), the above solution did not work. The problem was indeed caused by the hard-disk unloading the heads when idle, and the Load_Cycle_Count SMART statistic could be seen increasing when the clicks occurred.

hdparm -B settings did not seem to help, and a check of the harddrives specs (available in hitachigst.com) verified that setting the APM mode off (hdparm -B 255) would set it actually to the lowest APM mode (the same as hdparm -B 254). In this drive, 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 model (Hitachi C4K60), and is not true for more recent Hitachi drives, which do disable APM with -B 255.

Samsung MP0804H 80GB

On this drive, 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.

The drive had already 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, but made it quite clear that the drive was badly in need of some care.

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

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