E6520 Owner's Thread

After reinstalling windows7 64bit I get a reoccuring click noise from the 250 GB hard disk drive every 5 to 15 seconds. It's different from the writing or reading noise which is hardly noticable. May be related to parking the heads?
It kind of disturbs suince everything else is cool and silent.

Dell e6520 + Intel i2520 + Intel HD3000 + Western Digital 250 HD 5400Rpm

 

Could it be Windows indexing? Perhaps give it some ON time to settle down and go away. Also research for HDD firmware... sometimes this is updated to address such operational issues.

GK

 

Could be indexing, drive power management in Windows, AAM, etc.

I disabled indexing on my E6420 and it will sometimes make drive ticking noises as if it's still indexing. The HDD is a Samsung 500GB 7200rpm HM500JJ/D. Will need to check AAM using the Samsung tool later.

Also, some of the more recent WD laptop HDDs have very aggressive power management in their firmware which will sleep the drive after a few minutes (and cause the system to apparently freeze for a few seconds while the drive is spinning back up). It works fine for externals since it isn't always frequently used but causes a lot of headaches when used as a primary drive.

 

Of course comfired by cpu-z and also bios also shows 1600 ram.

 

E6520 Service Manual

 

I just bought a refurbished E6520 from Dell Outlet, which came with the 9 cell battery that sticks out of the back of the laptop. I'd prefer a lower profile 6 cell--if anyone in the San Francisco bay area would like to swap please contact me.

Thanks

 

^its worth it to learn to love the 9-cell 'bump'...you'll love the extra battery life.

 

Regarding the clicking noise of the WD-hard disk: no it's not the usual read- /write-noise of the hard disk. if I copy something uge the hard disk is hardly noticable. I guess it's either related to the 512e-format or parking the heads or a driver issue (I installed in no particular order).
Just wanted to hear if any other user notices this sound.
Thanks for your replies.
Rewolfer.

 

it took a while but i found out the advanced power management of the disk caused the heads in idle mode to park. to shut this behaviour off get hddscan and send via bat-file a command like this:
"D:\prefs\hdd\hddscan\HDDScan.exe" "\\?\ide#diskwdc_wd2500bevt-75a23t0__________________01.01a01#*********" -APM 0

 

That'd be just running the drive constantly. You don't want to be doing that since it will wear it faster.

Not sure if WD had a tool to disable that feature.