Hello,

I have a problem with my laptop's HDD . I recently (2 weeks ago) bought a Samsung laptop with a Hitachi HTS547550A9E384 hard drive. There are no performance issues, i did a variaty of tests including Hitachi's own fitness test tools.

The hdd is making a noticeable "clicking" sound every few seconds. This happens when i use laptop to read documents or surfing on simple web pages.
I read about this problem and it seems it's something many laptop users experienced :
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_w ... e_clicking

I did some research , the problem is caused by the mode hard disk is set to work to prevent accidents, or to save power. The actual noise is coming from the actuator's arm parking its heads whenever hard disk isn't used.
When the heads are parked (on their "rest" place) the "clicking" sound happens.

Now, to resolve this issue i tried the following with succes, however those are not permanently and have to be changed again after every software/hardware reset :

1. I used a program called quietHDD which works great , it allows me to change Advanced Power Management from the default 128 to 192 (i choose this because it made the clicking sounds dissapear) from maximum 254(disabled).
Again, the problem is, i have to start this manualy or as a service on every windows startup or sleep/hybernate.
So this is just a temporarily fix.

2. I used another program called HDDScan (more complex than quietHDD) with the same results though. The changes aren't permanently and have to be re-applied after reset.
Btw, HDDScan reported only green informations on all possible tests, so another assurance it's not a hardware performance problem.

3.I used HDAT2, this one from a bootable cd and from a dos-like environment. I changed APM from 80h (128 decimal) to C0h(192 dec.). The values aren't set to default when you use windows reset, but they are reseted on shutdown or sleep/hybernate. So i'm back from where i started.

I want to mention i also tried Hitachi's own Feature Tools but it won't let me modify APM. So this didn't even worked changing the APM value like with other programs, and it is a Hitachi hdd tool....(i'm blown up now).

I already tried the mhdd tool vers 3.6 . I have an option for Automatic Acoustic Management (even though my hdd doesnt support it) but i found no option to change Advanced Power Management.

I need to set the APM value to more than the initial 128 but permanently, is there a way to do this? I also searched for firmware updates but there aren't any available for my Travelstar hdd.

Here are some information about my laptop and hdd:
Laptop SAMSUNG NP300E5X
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies Ltd., P01RAJ
Disk: Hitachi HTS547550A9E384
Firmware: JE30A50A

With best regards,
Andrew M.

Did you purchase the laptop and drive separately?

_________________
Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Nope, i didn't purchased them separately.

Possible solutions (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. Temporary relief has been found by using hdparm to turn off power management for the drive:
# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
That should stop the drive from parking the heads except when turning off. You can also try
# hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
which doesn't turn power management off, but is the least aggressive setting: it will still unload heads, but far less often. (The drives are prepared to withstand a great number of head unloads: 200,000 unloads are typical, and Hitachi drives tolerate about 600,000 unloads.)
To make these changes permanent, you have to ensure that the -B commands are reissued at every boot, after resuming from disk or RAM, after hotswapping, and every time the ThinkPad BIOS might try to override them. This is done in two steps: changing the default settings when the system boots, and changing the settings when the system resumes after the lid is closed and re-opened.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_w ... e_clicking

Suggest to read that entire page.
You may find it useful to check the SMART values for load/unload cycle parameter in relation to the particular task performed at a certain time. You may notice certain patterns.

From a data recovery perspective, these drives are relatively new and I have only seen a couple in for recovery. So, there has not been enough traffic of these new models to yet observe a definitive trend. Needless to say, they are kind of a PITA to recover.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Well, those commands work on linux, but im using Windows.
I get the same result by using quietHDD https://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/, which i can make it run as a startup service so i dont have to manually start it over and over again.
Or i can use HDDScan http://hddscan.com/ and create a batch file which i can put it in Startup folder to run on every startup.

What i wanted to know was how can i use MHDD to change the BIOS or HDD Firmware's settings (to flash them) so those APM values are kept permanently.

I do not think you can do that with MHDD. Outside of MHDD, I do not know how to help.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

For windows software you could look at hard disk sentinel
Disk>Advanced Power Management

Loki