Hi everyone before anyone asks, my mobility power setting preferences already are set so that hardrive is to never spin down on battery or while plugged in.

I have a 3 year old 2.5” Seagate 500gb hardrive in my 3.5 year old studio xps 1340 laptop. I recently upgraded my motherboard to the new one with an integrated Geoforce 210m graphics chip to reap some better gaming ability. I’ve had no problems since installing the motherboard for a week now, but just yesterday upon running my laptop on battery ( something I don’t often do as it’s a 3 year old battery giving me an hour of life) 60% into the discharge cycle I began hearing the hardrive spin down and spin up back to back every minute or so, I immediately thought my hardrive must be showing signs it’s on its way out, it was not anything like the click of death sound, it was simply the hardrive essentially spinning down completely and starting up, the computer slightly slowed. I immediately ran to connect it to my wall outlet for power the laptop’s hardrive.

My question is could it at be possible that the battery is so old, that it’s outputting low enough voltage at the end of its discharge cycle that it fails to sufficiently provide the voltage required by the 7200 rpm hardrive/mobo. I ran HWmonitor and the batter voltage does significantly drop below 11.5 volts towards the < 50% discharge portion. While plugged in the app shows 12.6 volts running through mobo

I ran hdparm and it said hardrive had a “100%” in “ health” and was in “ perfect condition”.

There has been no strange noises/unexpected spindown/spinups from the hardrive since that one afternoon occurrence.


What do you think guys, is this hardrive on its way out? Or did the Battery cause the problem? I’m too afraid to try again (discharging the battery to below 50%) and seeing what happens

Based on voltage info i say yes to battery issue you can always run seatools diagnostics to check out the drive just to be certain

Totally agree with networks.

You've got a 3 y/o battery now running an uprated gfx chip on a new mobo in an old machine, which only used to give 1 hr of life on batt. with the old mobo? Gaming and batteries just don't go well together, especially an old battery that's on it's last legs lol.

You should get a new battery, 1 hr of life is poor to start with but you're loading it even more.

You say your drive is 3 y/o, you should back that up anyway, but I'd plump for the batt.

S

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