Clicking Noise issue *resolved*

[jb1007]

Just gotta add I'm pretty impressed. Firefox/IE/Word/Excel all load up much more quickly than before. Similar to how my deskto with 7200rpm drives respond.

[Cyanize]

Is there any downside to longevity of the disk, heat, battery implications, etc?

I've been running my HDD in this mode for quite some time now. After changing the settings in NHC I did a couple of drive health checks, all of these turned out fine. I used the laptop extensively and did a couple of battery longevity tests.

The battery time did drop around 25 minutes to my previous tests, so it's nothing substantial. As for the HDD longevity (life), I checked back with Seagate and their official answer was, that it didn't affect the hdd lifespan.
After doing some research on this subject I came to the conclusion that frequent spin-ups and spin-downs do reduce HDD life (so power saving modes only conserve battery life), but manufactures already account for these within a "regular" lifespan of a modern mobile HDD (which is around 4.5-5 years).

And as most people exchange their laptops more frequently, I don't really worry about this issue that much.

As for heat, I did a couple of measurements with my digital thermometer, I couldn't detect any difference when compared to normal operation.

Hope this answers your questions.

PS: And yes it did affect my numbers in HD Tune benchmarks (except maybe access time).

[nizzy1115]

there were heat numbers a while back for this and it was only a degree or 2 at most difference.

[Racy]

someone please sticky this!

[deadsimple]

I've been using this fix since Cyanize posted it a week ago. Laptop has almost completely stopped making noise. Both the loud hard-disk activity noise as well as that power-saving "tink" have gone.

In terms of temperature I can't really comment as my laptop barely produces much noticeable heat, even when I'm running CAD simulations for hours ...

[Racy]

bump, and sticky vote!

[madflava54]

So I did this and the click is gone, but sometimes, I get like random HDD spinning or accessing. I never got this before. It goes away when I hit "analyze" in Windows Defrag. Not sure why this is, but my external used to get super loud and I somehow discovered hitting analyze fixed the problem. Any idea what's up now?

[Cyanize]

Are you running Vista?

If so, then there's a couple of things you can do, like disabling the indexing service and a few more things found here.

If you're running XP, then maybe try looking at the task manager (ctrl+alt+del), which processes are using resources when the HDD spins up. (I personally only get this because I use diskeeper (auto defrag. when laptop is idle)).

There can be a number of reasons for HDD activity ( a huge load of them in Vista), and a few in XP. When you hit analyze in any HDD defragmenting software, the OS temporarily locks down the partition so it can read the location of your files, and therefore stops all HD activity for a second. (at least in XP and above)

[madflava54]

Are you running Vista?

If so, then there's a couple of things you can do, like disabling the indexing service and a few more things found here.

If you're running XP, then maybe try looking at the task manager (ctrl+alt+del), which processes are using resources when the HDD spins up. (I personally only get this because I use diskeeper (auto defrag. when laptop is idle)).

There can be a number of reasons for HDD activity ( a huge load of them in Vista), and a few in XP. When you hit analyze in any HDD defragmenting software, the OS temporarily locks down the partition so it can read the location of your files, and therefore stops all HD activity for a second. (at least in XP and above)

I am running XP. I don't think there are any programs that are using or requiring HD activity though. I do have indexing disabled. I feel like this problem started since I got the NHC program and changed the HD settings.

[Cyanize]

I am running XP. I don't think there are any programs that are using or requiring HD activity though. I do have indexing disabled. I feel like this problem started since I got the NHC program and changed the HD settings.

Then just reset NHC from 254 (max performance) to the default 128 (without spin down) and see if it's caused by the app.

As is wrote before, there can be a lot of reasons for HDD activity, without checking your processes when the HDD activity occurs, there's no telling what might be causing your problems.