Clicking harddisk sound VGN-FE21S sequel

[Engys]

Hi everybody, I read the FE11S thread about clicking harddrive sound. Greetings to the Greek people! I purchase a VGN-FE21S in Berlin Sony Center and the harddrive also clicks like hell. I gave it back to the service to repaire this harddrive problem. They build in a new harddrive, but it still have this clicking sound. One of the main reasons to purchase a Sony VGN-FE21S was that I could not hear any noise. Now I ask myself where is the differnce between the models they show up in Sony Style Stores and that ones they sell to the customers? They show up a noiseless rocket and gave me a machine that clicks every 5 seconds. In my opinion it should be a report for the German c't and I am sure they will find the problem.

Sincerely ... Engys

[steve171274]

i to have a VGN-FE21S and i have not come across this noise ,and i had better not either i paid £1200 for it and if i starts making clicking noises its going back,my advice is take it back and start shouting,that normally works for me.

[pmitev]

I had similar problem. The noise was from "parking" the heads when HDD was idle. The problem is that moments after that it goes back because of I/O activity and again and again. I got that suddenly after 2 years of using mine GRT815M.

Solution - check with some "S.M.A.R.T." tool the count of the "parks" it must increase after every click - if so - this is the problem. Get to the HDD vendor web page and get the software they are providing to configure the HDD. In my case - IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool 2.01 and read the manual. Usually it goes to a parameter they relate to performance or power save. Sliding toward performance increases the time before the HDD parks the heads. You can increase the value a little bit and it might work, otherwise increase more. Above some limit it will stop parking at all.

You can do the same from Linux with hdparm -B /dev/hda etc.

from the "hdparm" manual: -B Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the drive.

[pmitev]

I feel like saying a bit more.

I have spent at least 2 days looking over Internet for solution, reading through manuals about the power save features of my particular HDD model (once I have located the problem)... anyway.

If you have at least one fan running constantly (even when on battery) and P4 not mobile! (like mine beast that I have) parking the heads every 5s and getting to whatever "intermediate" powersave mode MAKES NO DIFERENCE AT ALL - sorry for the guys that spent time implementing the feature. It is almost the opposite - parking/unparking the heads seems to consume enough power itself compared to just hanging over the plates (not safe - I know). I did what I suggested in the previous post, sliding a bit - it worked (It actually does not park since within 10s there was always I/O activity) but since I use my computer mainly as desktop replacement I decided to turn off that feature completely.

If you have clicking noise after that (I doubt that anyway) your problem is somewhere else.

Or another suggestion:
Make sure that you don't have program that accesses the disk every 10s or so. This is not an easy task if you don't have a good guess (or at least annoying). Sometimes it is beyond what you can do (Windows services or programs that keep log files...).

[out-of-space]

thanks for your answer.
did you download the sound file in the other thread? and did it sound like your problem? and did you hear of any vaio users, that could solve the problem using your suggestion?
cheess
o-o-s

[pmitev]

Quite similar indeed…
Except that the click for me was followed by silence because the noise was coming from the parking process. In the sample, I think I can hear the parking process, way silenter than the unparking - the actual click in the sample.

Try this command line tool:

http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/smart/smart.htm

As administrator (in "Command Prompt" window) run smart.exe

C:>smart.exe
SMART & Simple for Windows NT/2000/XP V1.01
Copyright 2001-2003 Craig.Peacock@beyondlogic.org
Opened Drive \\.\c: . .

SMART Enabled    : Yes
Model Number     : IC25N080ATMR04-0
Firmware Version : MO4OAD1A
Serial Number    : xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Drive Size       : 80.026 GB

ID   Attribute                  Type  Threshold Value Worst        Raw St
---- -------------------------- ----- --------- ----- ----- ---------- --
[01] Raw Read Error Rate        Prefailure   62   100   100          0 OK
[02] Throughput Performance     Prefailure   40   106   106       5825 OK
[03] Spin Up Time               Prefailure   33   125   125          1 OK
[04] Start/Stop Count           Advisory      0    98    98       3409 OK
[05] Reallocated Sector Count   Prefailure    5   100   100          0 OK
[07] Seek Error Rate            Prefailure   67   100   100          0 OK
[08] Seek Time Performance      Prefailure   40   100   100         45 OK
[09] Power On Hours Count       Advisory      0    84    84       7284 OK
[0A] Spin Retry Count           Prefailure   60   100   100          0 OK
[0C] Power Cycle Count          Advisory      0    99    99       1997 OK
[BF] Unknown SMART Attribute    Advisory      0   100   100          0 OK
[C0] Power-Off Park Count       Advisory      0   100   100          3 OK
[C1] Load/Unload Cycle Count    Advisory      0    90    90     106573 OK
[C2] Drive Temperature          Advisory      0   157   157    1179683 OK
[C4] Re-Allocated Data Count    Advisory      0   100   100          0 OK
[C5] Pending Sector Count       Advisory      0   100   100          0 OK
[C6] UnCorrectable Sector Count Advisory      0   100   100          0 OK
[C7] CRC Error Count            Advisory      0   200   200          0 OK

During my clicking nightmare the parameter “[C1] Load/Unload Cycle Count” was changing every time I heard the click. This is a certain way to identify the reason for the clicks.

I will suggest this tool as well, since it offers more features:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
You can run some internal self-test:

C:>smartctl -t short /dev/hda      #(Linux conventions)
smartctl version 5.34 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-5 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Short self-test routine immediately in off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART Short self-test routine immediately in off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 2 minutes for test to complete.
Test will complete after Mon Oct  9 10:23:00 2006

Use smartctl -X to abort test.

and after finishing (about 2 minutes for the short test) you may run the following command to check the result. BE CAREFUL WITH THAT TOOL!!!

C:>smartctl.exe -l selftest /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.33 [i386-pc-mingw32] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LB
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      7269         -
# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      7149         -
# 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      6189         -
# 4  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5452         -
# 5  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5347         -
# 6  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5254         -
# 7  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5192         -
# 8  Extended offline    Completed without error       00%      5186         -
# 9  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5184         -

P.S. You don't have to install anything in the both cases. You don't have to run the daemon part from the smartctl pakage to run the S.M.A.R.T. self-tests.

[out-of-space]

tried the s.m.a.r.t. tool from the fujitsu site. it didn't recognized any hdd in my system.

[out-of-space]

and the smart tool you provided didn't work for me. black window popped up and was closed after 0,1 sec.

[pmitev]

and the smart tool you provided didn't work for me. black window popped up and was closed after 0,1 sec.

Open "Command Prompt" as Administrator and run smart.exe from the directory you have copied it.

[pmitev]

Just to point out how ridiculous might be the reason for the problem.
After two years without such a problem I decided to change to login mode where the users can switch sessions. And here it is. Clicks every now and then... After a week - still the same. I rolled back in mode where only one user can login locally - didn't solve the problem. If I remember well I have traced back the problem to Windows service that was responsible for login sessions... Go figure it...
So perhaps there is a smarter solution finding out what is the real cause for it, because at the time I had this problems under Windows I did not have any under Linux on the same machine.