Hard drive noise, it sounds like ringing bells.

I have just noticed that my sony vaio hard drive or drives (as it has 2 in Raid 0) have started to make a small faint sound that sounds like ringing bells, its like a faint jingle sound. Its fairly quiet at the moment and you just hear it faintly, its not the start of something more severe is it as ive never had this sound in the past ?

It sounds like my drives but i cannot be 100% sure of this, its coming from the bottom right of my laptop and ive just put my ear to the plastic and it sounds like a morse code sort of sound with a bit of a ringing sound, the faint ringing sounds like one of them bells you get in a pets collar like a cat bell.

 

I think it might be normal. My new fujitsu 80 GB laptop drive did that from day one. Mine sounded more like a spring being release after being under tension, a "pa ting" sound .

I have a hitachi drive now and it doesn't make that sound, don't know why. I think it is the drives parking them selves after spinning.

 

Just let it run the way its running. I wouldn't try to tweak HDDs when they are in a RAID 0 array, esp when its Intel's software RAID.

 

does it make the same sound if you put the CPU under load?

 

Yes, it seems to be both under idle and under load. It was never there previously, its something thats just appeared ?

 

Is it plug with the power cable or running in battery mode? I had the same problem on HP laptop before, but it only happen when it is in battery mode, I think it switch to power save mode and the HD is not running without enough power... However, I'm not sure how to solve it...

 

If it didn’t make that sound before, but started all of a sudden, then backup all your important data ASAP. Any change in hard dive sound is not a very good sign. But if it was like that from the beginning, or if you are talking about a new computer, then most probably nothing to worry about.

 

raid 0 is going to be loud no matter how you cut it.
Raid 0 works by putting half of each file on each drive. So everytime you go to open something or save something both harddrives need to be used.

K-TRON

 

This is the point, my hard drives have always been very quiet and the laptop is only 3 months old. Surely if it was going to be noisy in Raid 0 then it would have been noisy from the very start, this noise has only just started happening as it was never there before.

 

Some further questions,
1) is the laptop located in the same room of the house it has always been in?
I ask because say you removed a refrigerator or air conditioned from your room, the room is quieter, thus you hear more noise from your laptop.

2) is the fan coming on in your laptop?
Usually the sound of the fan will cover up the noise made by the harddrives.

3) do you have any background processes running like antivirus scans, causing the harddrives to be continually used?

Another thing you should probably do is download hdtune.
After it is installed go to the "health" tab. If anything is highlighted in red or yellow you should replace the harddrives.

K-TRON

 

1) The laptop has always been located in the same room and doesn`t move, it works off the mains. Its an AR series Sony Vaio with a 17 inch screen so its not exactly portable anyway

2) The fan is always on, i don`t know whether this is normal with Vaio`s, even in idle the fan is always on but at a lower speed.

With the fan always being on in theory i shouldn`t notice this jungle bell noise that rings from my hard drive or drives as its impossible to tell if its one drive or two.

3) I always run my anti virus scans manually, i don`t have them set to run on a schedule so i will know when they are running etc.

I`ll download hdtune and see what it throws up.

 

I ran hdtune, on the error scan tab it shows up as all green which i take it is all good. The health tab doesn`t give me any options, its basically blank.

This was my performance, i only have 4200 rpm hard drives.



My laptop is a Vaio as previously said, the details of the hard drives are below.


Hard Drive 2 X 250 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 4200 rpm

Storage Controller Serial ATA

The hard drives are: 2 x FUJITSU MHX2250BT

Its running Raid 0

 

Does anyone else have an opinion ?

 

It is probably loud because those drives are really old. I think they came out like 2-3 years ago. I dont know why Sony still sells 4200rpm drives, they are horribly slow.

Fujitsu's website states that the drives generate 21db of noise:
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/mobile/mhx2300bt-sata.html

I can guarantee they are louder than the manufacturers quote because just look at the seak times fujitsu claims and look at what they actually perform. 20.4ms is pretty bad

I would recommend selling both drives and upgrading to a single 500gb 5400rpm drive. It will be single handedly faster than both your 4200rpm drives in raid 0.

Plus from what I hear the 500gb 5400rpm WD and Seagate are cheap and quiet.

K-TRON