Topic: Laptop Harddrives

[Eagle131]

Well back in the fall, I accidentally dropped my laptop bag with my laptop in it.  It hit the pavement not too hard but just enough to screw up the hard drive.  The stock hard drive ran for about 2-3 weeks after the drop, and then it crashed.  So I thought that buying a replacement would fix the issue.  I found a cheap Seagate Momentus 7400.4 320 GB (I think) and that thing crashed, as in my laptop not even detecting it within the first week of use.  I read really bad reviews after I bought it, with several other consumers complaining that the drive crashed within the first weeks of use.  So I got a refund for it and decided to purchase a Western Digital drive.  It ran all sure and fine for a few weeks but now I get this loud click noise at random periods of time.  It's not a constant clicking.  It probably averages around maybe 1-2 clicks every 2 hours. 

My question, is could something on the mobo have gotten screwed up that it messes up all these hard drives I'm buying?  I checked the sata cable and it's all connected properly but that's where my motherboard knowledge stops.  Could it be driver issues?  the drive is running on a default microsoft driver.  Or could it be that I didnt partition the drive? I just installed XP on the main partition. 

[TechPro]

Most likely not a fault of the mobo, or driver.

If anything other than the hard drive itself ... it's possible the laptop isn't cooling itself sufficiently and the HDs are getting hot (which often results in early drive failure).

Are the cooling fan(s) working well?  Does the laptop get hot?  Really hot?

[Zantor]

Firstly, don't ever get a Seagate; they haven't been the honda of hard drives since they bought Maxtor. WD has amazed me time and again with the quality of their drives.

If you are still having consistent problems with your drive, I don't think it's motherboard or controller related. How is the environment around the drive? Have you checked the operating temperature with HDTune? It shouldn't be higher than 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

[Eagle131]

I just downloaded the trial of HDTune.  Everything seems to check out except (0A) Spin Retry Count.

Current: 100
Worst: 99
Threshhold: 51
Data: 1
Status: warning

Can anyone interpret this? Btw the temperature doing average activities is 36 degrees Celsius.

[Ronin RedFox]

Heh, there is something like this related to the clicking going on in the Nexuiz forums too.  

http://www.alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5859

[Eagle131]

Heh, there is something like this related to the clicking going on in the Nexuiz forums too.  

http://www.alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5859

Thats....and interesting discussion.

[Ronin RedFox]

Indeedly so. 

[-<WillyP>-]

I just downloaded the trial of HDTune.  Everything seems to check out except (0A) Spin Retry Count.

Current: 100
Worst: 99
Threshhold: 51
Data: 1
Status: warning

Can anyone interpret this? Btw the temperature doing average activities is 36 degrees Celsius.

You might consider Speed Fan. You can submit data from within the program, although I've never done so, so I can't say what the support is like.

SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures  in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T.  info and show hard disk temperatures. SpeedFan supports SCSI  disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature). SpeedFan can access digital temperature sensors and can change fan speeds  accordingly, thus reducing noise. SpeedFan can find almost any hardware monitor chip connected to the 2-wire SMBus  (System Management Bus (trademark belonging to SMIF, Inc.), a subset of the I2C protocol) and works fine with Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Windows Vista. It works with Windows 64 bit too.

[Eagle131]

Thanks WillyP.  I actually found, according to some HD Tune users, that a spin retry count warning isn't much to worry about, unless HDTune gives you a failure notice.  So I guess it's alright...I hope.  I looked it up when firefox bluescreened my laptop last night lol.  I thought my HDD went under.