May 2008 - I bought a Vaio NR21M with the MHY hard drive and have the clicking sound. That's horrible.

I bought my SZ61MN in the beginning of 2008. After all installations done, the hard disk also showed up with this "nice" clicking sound (it was a 120 gb Seagate Momentus). After several trials with different settings in XP I gave up and made a complete Recovery on a 160 GB WesternDigital hd. But when the laptop went into idle, the clicking sound came up again      . But with the WD disk the clicking sound was much lower than with the old hd, so I kept this state until now. (Almost forgot: I tried also a third disk, a Samsung HM16HJI, but it also clicked!)

Last week i bought an Asus EeePC with Windows XP. Reading in several forums for EeePCs over the last days, today I came across an interesting thread which also had the clicking sound of the hd as topic (I have to mention my EeePCs disk is not clicking  ).

In the thread the tool "HDDScan" was mentioned by a user there - I run it on the Vaio just 3 hours ago, with the tool I disabled the option "Advanced Power Management" of the harddisk - since then the only sound coming from my Vaio (which is running idle in its docking station) is the fan in the background 

EDIT: After reboot this morning I checked the APM option status and found out it was enabled again  . Seems the disabled setting is not saved - too bad  . I'll let the Vaio run over some hours in the evening to see if the clicking shows up again.

Here's the link: HDDScan
The option is found by clicking Tasks > Features > IDE Features after the selection of your hard drive. In the appearing dialog just click on the "Disable"-button in the "Advanced Power Management" section.

Perhaps some other users with the clicking sound prob may take a try and report?

MaxNX

I have the same problem of HDD clicking sound from my VGN-CR42S/L (2 weeks old). Hard drive is Fujitsu MHY2200BH 200GB 5400 rpm.

Complained to Sony last week. They were good in their quick response. Collected the laptop last week, returned back y'day. The repair report says they found some bad sectors on the HDD, so they have replaced it with a new one, of the same model though! Funny enough and as I expected, the problem still remains, in fact the clicking has become worse now than before!!!

Not sure whether there is anything else I can ask them to do now. Are there any BIOS updates available for this model of HDD?

Thanks

NNC

Hi another newbie here, just bought a FW21L and on day 2 it developed the annoying clinking sound. so far its  happened twice in the 6 days ive owned it. Only solution i've found so far is to restart the computer.

I have FW31ZJ have Fujitsu HDD , clicking sound appear sometimes .. I am living in Turkey.. please help me

I have FW31ZJ have Fujitsu HDD , clicking sound appear sometimes .. I am living in Turkey.. please help me

I hope this is not true, but there is another point about "tick-ticka" dead disk or dying disk or hard working disk. It may be the heads inside the hard disk seeking tracks. The heads hit an index stop and count tracks from the mechanical buffer, note: not a software buffer

Use a hard disk checking program. I see you have tried this? what is the state of the "SMART" status?

It may be the hard disk is busy. I heard my laptop (old VGN-A517S) ticking from the hard drive. My solutions are listed below.

1)     Use CHKDSK full scan (requires reboot as it will run before Windows fully boots up). Check all partitions you can.

2)     Use a defraging program supplied with Windows. This will sort out the file structure for optimum seek and read times. Also the heads in a disk drive are less busy in a structure or sored out file system. The heads have a reduced need to keep moving.

3)     Increase the memory to the most your device will take. This will be dictated by the operating system bit size, for example 32 or 64 byte Windows. What amount of memory will the motherboard actually address at its top limit. Note this will increase the speed of the operating system up to a sensible point. This will enable Windows to store information in RAM not simulated RAM on the hard drive. Note there will always some simulated memory at all times anyway. RAM is faster than mechanical disk drives, it may not be faster than solid state hard drives. So in essence, Windows uses the extra RAM and not the hard dive so much. Windows will however always use the hard drive to simulate extra RAM. This only reduces the need for the "Swap-File" or "Page-File".

4)      let Windows set the size of the Swap file.

5)     I know this may be silly but you don't have FOB? FOB being Foreign Object Blocking in fans or air cooling chutes.

6)     As computers (most not all) have cooling fans and other moving parts, does a motorised part have bearing failure. Hard disks whine or rumble but not usually click in this repect.