Inspiron 8600 Hard Drive Ticking

Question

Hello, I am a little confused on what is considered normal ticking by the hard drive versus a tick that can be problematic (as the one that is frequently described on the website).  Can somebody describe what would be unusual behavior for these Hitachi hard drives.  How can I diagnose if my 40 gb hard drive is bad?   I received by laptop on October 23,2004.  If the hard drive is bad should I ask dell for another one, or should I just buy another one and replace?     Thanks

lumixfan · Answer

you have already mentioned hitachi 40 gig. so ignore that part of my question

lumixfan · Answer

One basic thing. If you are not doing any activity, no sound should come. 2 possibilities: either windows is causing some continuous activity or hard disk is error prone. Are you gettig a tick-tick-tick every second? Can you go to Cntl-Alt-Del and say what is the cpu performance when there is no activity by you. What hard disk you have? what capacity? what os are you running? factory installed or custom installed from xp CD's? When you boot windows are you getting the sound or it comes only after windows xp boots up?   i called and got a replacement hard disk. same hitachi 80 gig. I am still underway in my testing and i have posted in a separate thread my experiences.

PINE · Answer

You can try Hitachi's fitness test program here http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

You can also use the Feature tool on the same page to quiet down the drive.

5150 Mobile P4 3.06 HT
64mb Nvidia
768 Ram
UXGA Samsung
Hitachi 7k60
1300 Wireless
DVD+RW NEC 6100a
Bios A29
XP Pro SP2

amazingspeed11 · Answer

Hello.

If you're worried that your hard drive is at near failure, ALWAYS backup data IMMEDIATELY. I have a brand new Insp 8600 which is only 3 months old and after 'normal' day to day usage, I began to notice a difference in system stability and hard drive performance. The performance drop and the system began locking up far more frequently when I was multitasking with Winamp playing some videos in the background. The hard disk then jams and has a 'click' sound that seems to go on forever.

I ran Dell diagnositics and found a read error (possibly a bad sector) on the hard drive. I was lucky I backed-up nearly 60% of my critical data but unfortunately the remaining 40% was not backed-up on time. :(

If the hard drive is just accessing data, you should be familiar with how it sounds like. However, if you notice that it is starting to act a bit weird, run Dell diagnostics and immediately back up all your important work to a separate hard disk.

Cheers.
Amazingspeed

Storage, Drives & Media

Inspiron 8600 Hard Drive Ticking

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