How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Rebellious
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How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Post by Rebellious » Fri Jul 13, 2012 11:51 am

I have several new 2.5" 500GB Hitachi HTS725050A7E630 and HTS727550A9E364. They make the "clink" parking noise, in XP they do it constantly, in Win7 less so but it's still very annoying. In Linux they don't do it at all.

Something in the Windows OS keeps accessing the disks even when they're idle, even if formatted ext4. I've checked APM with Hitachi FTOOL and they're all set for max performance xFE (254). I've disabled "superfetch" service in Win7 but they're still clicking every few seconds.

Any ideas?

cmthomson
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Re: How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Post by cmthomson » Fri Jul 13, 2012 12:44 pm

If you're running any software (eg, SpeedFan, AIDA) that monitors the disk temperature (via SMART), it will spin up the disks even when they are idle.

I tried several times to get XP to spin down my idle disks, and eventually gave up. In my situation, it was best to let them spin all the time.

Rebellious
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Re: How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Post by Rebellious » Fri Jul 13, 2012 2:08 pm

cmthomson wrote:If you're running any software (eg, SpeedFan, AIDA) that monitors the disk temperature (via SMART), it will spin up the disks even when they are idle.

I tried several times to get XP to spin down my idle disks, and eventually gave up. In my situation, it was best to let them spin all the time.

Thank you, I'm not running Speedfan or AIDA, but maybe Win7 keeps checking on the disks' status via SMART ? If so, I'd like to know how to stop it. I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with the HDs, the Z7K500 is the kickass-est 2.5" out there.

nutball
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Re: How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Post by nutball » Sat Jul 14, 2012 12:22 am

Have a look in the BIOS, often there's a setting there to disable SMART. Win 7 might give up checking if it thinks the drives aren't SMART-capable.

HFat
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Re: How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Post by HFat » Wed Jul 18, 2012 5:35 am

Windows can definitely spin down drives.
SMART monitoring would indeed be a prime suspect if drives containing no readable partitions are kept from idling as well. Otherwise I'd be looking at indexing and page files rather than Superfetch.
Microsoft has software you can use to log what accesses the drive (I don't know if it'll catch SMART though): www.sysinternals.com

markanini
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Re: How to stop hard disk clicking in Windows

Post by markanini » Tue Jul 30, 2013 1:30 pm

Sorry for reviving an old thread, but FWIW I was able to solve the problem described by OP by running two instances of Speedfan.

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