Clicking harddisk sound FE11S sequel

[Carelino]

Now just like a lot of Vaio FE11S users I had the clicking sound where my hardisk is. People who suggest it is the hardisk working, please save me the trouble of telling 100 times it is not the harddisk working sound. I had enough laptops to know the difference.

DOWNLOAD CLICKING SOUND

Now what I would like to know is if there has been anyone who send his/her laptop to Sony back to let them check it out. If yes, I ofcourse would really like to know what sony told you or what you did eventually. It seems to me nobody knows the solution. I did call sony and told them everything about the problem. They said it was something wich is new to them. I gave them the club-vaio link where people posted about the same problem. This coming week I am going to send my laptop to sony, this clicking sound disturbs me a lot.

I know that there are previous threads about this Old thread about clicking sound link , but I wanted to post a sequal where people could post their experience and opinion. Please don't suggest me to open up my harddisk or laptop, and once again it is NOT the harddisk working sound.

What happens: "The hard disk makes irregularly a clicking sound which is pretty loud two. Most certainly is not a working sound. It sounds like something is hitting the plastic of the laptop or something else. When I shut down my laptop and restart the sound is gone for a while." I personally think it has something to do with the reading arm. The clicking sound appears always when the laptop is not working. It's like when the harddisk is not working it cant get into the resting position, and keep on trying. I hope sony is going to spend serious time on this problem, especially it seems to be a common problem.

Important suggestions and remarks of others:

hard drive is made by fujitsu & they have a diagnostic software tool on the fujitsu web site & when i ran it, the program said no hard drive found on laptop, i spoke to fujitsu & they said i should wait for later version of software to come out, which i will do! anyone who goes to fujitsu web site, the version i tryed is 6.40

This is the response I have received from Fujitsu regarding the issue: We connected this drive MHV2160BT to our analyser and installed Windows XP Pro, we did not hear any obvious clicking noise unless you place your ear next to the drive so it is very quiet even though this does go into sleep mode at around every 4-10 seconds (idle). I would investigate if you can further into the specifications and configurations fitting of your Sony Laptop.

[NetHolik]

First of all I want to thank you, Carelino, for creating this thread.

Seems that this problem is not a case of one VAIO series.
I've got two FZ21Ms and you won't believe it - they're clicking.
The HD is, as mentioned by someone few posts earlier, Fujitsu MHY2200BH.
Whole thing is not frequent, but still - annoying.

I've contacted vaio-link line, but surprisingly they don't now anything about this, while this thread is almost 2 years old.
After a long talk it turned out that there has been opened case for FZ series concerning strange sounds coming from HD region.
Case, as claims man from the customer care line, has been opened in July 2007, but since then it's status is under investigation.
7 months for investigating already known problem is way too long, don't you think?

I can't send my vaio because I need it every day, as it is a my primary pc.
The man on the line suggested to open new case, so I send them the sample.
IMO, this is just the case of firmware update, so how hard can it be?
Maybe I even could apply the same update?
Hopefully Sony will come out will solution for FZ series.

I got my Vaio back in 5 days from pick-up. And had Sony calling me every 3 days to see if they could help me. In this day and age this is good customer care.

I'd like see Sony providing that kind of CC in Polnad.

[mmarcielo]

Hello,

I guess it's time to rename the thread - it stopped being just FE-series problem.

I've got FZ31M, and about 2 days after puchase it started clicking. The suggestion of e-support of VAIO was to go check if BIOS was to blame, but once there no clicking sound appeared. Which brought the VAIO team to some other conclusions I suppose, because they want my laptop picked up for repair.
And oh, there's no CD for firmware upgrade for FZ-series, according to same VAIO Support people.

I need my laptop for the next week or so, but am definitely going to give it a try and send it back to London to see if they really can fix it. Will keep everyone posted.

Looking out for a brighter future with my new VAIO
Marina

BTW, Carelino, you are a star! Thanks for starting this thread and for pushing VAIO Customer Support to pay attention to this problem!

[terrore]

I bought my laptop yesterday. Now its year 2008, month march, and i had the clicking sound.
I went to "control panel" -> "system" -> right click on the HD, then i enable "high speed", then i disabled again... and the clicking sound stoped... i think


Can i do anything else? it past 2 years almost since this topic was created and sony still hav the same problem :/...

its a Sony Vaio SZ series

[terrore]

no one knows? cause the clicking started again.

[jumbles1971]

I have an AR21S which had a clicking hard drive from the beginning - it's actually my second as I rejected the first one because of the clicking. Sony denied there was a problem and so did Fujitsu. Even though I'm running XP, I have the Vista Sidebar installed (taken from my Express Upgrade DVD) and I have a gadget on it that monitors my two hard drives (it also monitors my network drive which is pretty cool). Since I installed the gadget I very rarely hear the click - maybe every couple of months - and then all it takes is to shut down for a couple of hours until it cools down a bit. I know it's not a solution but until my laptop is out of warranty and I can replace the drives with something better myself it'll do for me.

Multi HDD Meter v2.3+

[Maninho75]

Hello,

I bought 6 months ago a Vaio FZ21M, and I haven't noticed any particular noise until a few days ago, when the hard disk started clicking...
I can hear every 3 or 4 seconds a light clicking noise which seems to come from the hard disk area.
I guess it must be the same clicking noise as yours, and I wanted to know if there was a solution for the FZ21Ms.

Did anyone fix this problem on his FZ21M ?

Thanks a lot

Emmanuel

[blackhaz]

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

[Carelino]

Funny that a lot of people keep having the same problem also in new laptop models from Sony. It seems also other brands besides sony has issues with this clicking sound. The problem seems to be the same brand of harddisk.

Just to let anybody know since I have sent my Laptop to Sony I never heard a clicking sound again. Then when bought new laptop of Sony FE31M (old one was stolen FE11S) which had no clicking sound thank god.

Now buying new harddisk Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200RPM LINK . Finally getting RID of that very annoying slow 160GB 4200RPM FuijSHITsu (although it always worked perfectly without ANY issues the previous one clicked). From NOW on I will only buy Wester Digital or Seagate. Also when a laptop comes with diffrent brand I will sell it and buy the one I want.

I hope post helped out a lot of people....

Good lucky everybody

[sroeder]

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

[gol70]

Vaio AR71S tested with:
- original FSiemens HDDs
- WD Caviar Black replacements
- Vista x32
- Vista x64
and clicking.....


It looks like general Vaio issue.