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What can I do about HD clicking...?

B

bovinda

Senior member
In both my Vista systems, when I initiate an activity (opening IE, browsing files, copying pix from flash card to HD, while playing games, almost anything) there is often a brief (several second) lag and then a single, audible click from the hard drive, after which the activity rapidly initiates/resumes. Sometimes it causes games to lag, music to skip, picture slideshows to slow, or programs to open more slowly.

After reading on the intarnet it seems like this is a feature of Vista, and some people have mentioned that it was correctable with SP1 for Vista. It did go away for a time after installing SP1, but it's since come back, and more prominently. It's obnoxious. Anything to be done about it?

I'm using Vista Home Premium 64.
 
sounds like drive is being turned off to save power as a part of power options... it is enabled by default... so what happens is on access it has to power-up first.
 
I've heard that that is a possibility and works for some (though not for others), so under power options I turned the HD on all the time, it should never power down. That hasn't resolved it the clicking for me, unfortunately.

Any other ideas, anybody?
 
I suppose it could be driver related, you might want to try updated chipset drivers.
But I'd also do a drive test with a manufacturers disk
Also I suppose you power supply could be causing it as well.
 
Originally posted by: bovinda
In both my Vista systems, when I initiate an activity (opening IE, browsing files, copying pix from flash card to HD, while playing games, almost anything) there is often a brief (several second) lag and then a single, audible click from the hard drive, after which the activity rapidly initiates/resumes. Sometimes it causes games to lag, music to skip, picture slideshows to slow, or programs to open more slowly.

After reading on the intarnet it seems like this is a feature of Vista, and some people have mentioned that it was correctable with SP1 for Vista. It did go away for a time after installing SP1, but it's since come back, and more prominently. It's obnoxious. Anything to be done about it?

I'm using Vista Home Premium 64.
Click to expand...

Thats either one of two things:

1) Its just the HD powering down and spinning back up, so I'd check your settings in the power CP applet and make sure it isnt set to spin down after too short a time.

2) Your hard drive is about to die.

If I were you, I'd make very sure that anything you want to keep if that drive does eventually bite the dust is well backed up.

Is your vista system a laptop or a desktop? A laptop would be much more likely to be pre-set to power down the drive quickly.
 
So, that's the thing...I set the power settings to contstantly on, I've double-checked that. Both of the systems are desktops.

I don't think it's dying hard drives (unless all 4 of my hard drives are about to die, which I suppose is possible, though they're all new [as of Dec] Samsung 500 GB drives), partly because they're all new, partly because it's happening on two separate systems, and partly because I've read similar accounts from others who found their HDs would click when booting up with Vista, but not with XP (like here and here). SP1 seemed to make it go away for a bit, but it's since come back with a vengeance. I haven't paid enough attention to notice if it was with a later update or not, unfortunately.

I'm going to try updating the chipset drivers when I get a chance. I'll try to find some Samsung diagnostic utilities to run as well, but I really don't think it's the HDs dying. I figure someone's got to have an idea about what is causing this or be familiar with it--since I've got two separate computers with different hardware (other than the HDs) and the same issue. Or maybe I did just have a streak of bad luck with my components.

Thanks for chiming in, guys. Any other ideas?
 
You mentioned that both your computers have the same model HDD.. have any other HDD's lieing around that you can use to test? Maybe its something weird with the firmware of the drive and the way vista handles itself as opposed to xp.

doesnt make much sense, but ive seen much weirder things with computers 😛
 
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