Solved: HDD making clicking, creaking, squeak noise randomly on my new HP Pavilion with ST2000LM003

[guerrez]

I have a configurable, custom Laptop HP Pavilion V2Z45AV with a 2TB harddisk from Seagate - Samsung, ST2000LM003 HN-M201RAD (Win10 Home 64bit).

The problem was that when the HDD controller was making the HDD going into power safe mode, the HDD was making this annoyng and dangerous (for the long term) noise. Second problem was the high Load/Unload Cycle Count.

After a lot of headache on finding why my HDD was making such a clicking, creaking, squeak noise randomly every few minutes, I finally managed to find the solution, I installed:

- CrystalDiskInfo
- Intel Rapid Storage Technology (I have a intel controller (Intel(R) 100 Series/C230 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller).
(https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25165/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-RAID-Driver)

In the Intel program I disabled Link Power Manager option: since that the sound is almost completely gone (much "better" sound, not a squeak anymore).

In CrystalDiskInfo I change the following settings (APM disabled on every start-up):

Plus:

In this way the number of Load/Unload Cycle Count dropped.

Note: FYI of course you need also to disable the power saving from Windows:

Hope that this post will help a lot of people that have a Pavilion or another laptop with this HDD, thinking it is damaged and sending it to support without finding a real solution.

Intel and HP should disable these option by default.

Success!!

[mthorniley]

Thankyou for this. 

I bought an  HP Pavilion 15-ak085sa in Jan and its been driving me mad with a random chiping and squaeking coming from the HDD

Sent it back to PC world who replaced the fan even though I told them it was the HDD

HP diagnosed the noise as the HDD, collected it and sent it back saying the HDD was faulty. After booting up, the random chirp/squeak was present again.

Was about to send it back when I came across this thread. - No issues so far.

One question, do you have to have Crystaldisk Info running at startup to keep the settings present?

Thankyou again

[guerrez]

No problem.

PS:  sometimes I still had that that noise, anyway way less than before.

PPS: there is a new version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology: 15.2.0.1020

I am testing it right now! 🙂

cheers

[pel01]

Hi, I just purchased a refurb Omen 17t laptop from Woot! Everything seems fine except the clicking noise you mention.

I did a complete system test which took 5 hours and showed no errors.

Here is the fix that worked for me.  I made no adjustments to the settings and the laptop is totally quiet now. You do have to load it in the "startup" folder so it will launch by itself.

quietHDD 1.5 Build# 250, 13. Dec. 2009

https://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/

About:

Do you own a a a Netbook, Laptop or a Computer with an with a hard disk?
Well, then you perhaps noticed an annoying click sound that comes from time to time.

That's the reason I wrote quietHDD. A very small Windows application (~60 KBytes) that eliminates this sound. After some time spent on developing more and more useful functions were created, but it still is - and will ever be - a small utility to reduce noise.
quietHDD is the succsessor of eeeHDD. I noticed that more and more people using eeeHDD on non ASUS Laptops/Netbooks so I renamed
eeeHDD to quietHDD and added some more stuff like a user configurable GUI, AAM and so on.

Please keep in mind: This noisy sound occurs mostly on Seagate hard drives, but other manufactures are reported also.

Features:

• Small (about 60KB)
• Does not eat CPU time and uses a very small amout of RAM
• Functional and responsive but powerfull, GUI and non-GUI usage possibe through command line interface
• Modifies or disables the Advanced Power Management (APM) feature setting of the primary harddrive depending on powered and battery state
• Modifies the  Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) feature setting  of the primary harddrive depending on powered and battery state
• Works with almost any modern PATA and SATA harddrive
• Compatibility: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 200x, Windows Vista