# Strange hard drive noises



## Markand (Apr 11, 2010)

Hi,

On my laptop (HP Probook 4510s) I have some noises when the hard drive seems idle, I means when he doesn't do many things. 

These noises are like *clicks* like it stops and restart. There is absolutely any problems, smartctl says no errors and no messages in dmesg so I don't know at all.

The weird thing is that happens only in FreeBSD, not Ubuntu. What could that be ?

This not happens every time..

I'm running 8.0-STABLE.

King regards,
David.


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## SR_Ind (Apr 11, 2010)

Strange. My experience is other way round.

I had the same problem in an experimental Ubuntu installation.

Try this, -> in your /etc/fstab file try to replace the mount option parameter from "rw" to "rw, noatime"

This will prevent unnecesssary flushes to the disk.


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## ckester (Apr 11, 2010)

When I hear "strange hard drive noises" my first thought is, I hope you have a recent backup.

Those noises could be benign, or they could be a harbinger of a drive failure.  It's reassuring that smartctl isn't reporting any problems, but I'd still want to play it safe if I were you.


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## Markand (Apr 12, 2010)

I'll try to add noatime, the hard drive is a brand new !

I make some backups every weeks but these noises don't happens every time it's so weird. In any cases, thanks for your testimonials.


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## fronclynne (Apr 12, 2010)

See what the Load_Cycle_Count is (and how much it is incrementing) with smartctl & if it might have something to do with this: Thread 12091


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## Markand (Apr 12, 2010)

Yes ! It was that, the number was incrementing. I tried to disable APM with ataidle ans it seems to work !

Kind regards, Thanks.
David.


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