Greatbone n3

My laptop HP Pavilion zv6000 I got from my friend works just well, but there is a problem, the HDD Toshiba MK8025GAS is too noisy. In a quiet room, I’m always irritated by that freaking noise. I know that is from HDD because of the clicking sound every time I open a file, a program, search files … However, it seems to be strange that now I notice that noise more intensively than before, so I perform a lot of test for errors and bad sectors, some reasons that may cause this. The first is CHKDSK tool.

Open Command Prompt and type chkdsk /f /r c: ( or any partitions ) You’ll say that you can get the same result by right-click on your drives - Properties - Open Tool - Error Checking … choose Automatically Fix File System error or Scan for attemp recovery of bad sectors … but you can have more options by other parameters like /i and /c .

Secondly I use Defragmenter tool. After that my Windows performance speed is faster, really, cause a lot of file is fragmented. But the noise is still.

I download and try HD Tune and HDD Life. The HD Tune error test actually found some bad sectors on the beginning track of my HDD, and HDD life warned something about spinning count and threshold. Since that is just a report and they can’t do anything to repair, maybe it’s belong to physical damages, not file structure.

And I found a great tool in Hiren Boot CD , HDD Regenerator 1.5.1 , which can perform some special task like repair bad sectors and even physical bad sectors. Yes it really worked since it detected and repaired while Windows Chkdsk or other tools can’t. But the main problem still exists.

Finally I format and renew entire partition C: which I think it’s damaged. This can be viruses, over-using of freezing programs like DeepFreeze, Returnil … so MFT is corrupted.

Fortunately I have a backup Ghost for my C: in the first time, so just use Norton Ghost 8.3 ( also ca be found in Hiren Boot CD ) and clone the disk. All back to the beginning. But Windows partition is only OS and some later non-important softwares located, not where my files is saved, so that’s OK. You should do the same too. Don’t keep your important files in OS partition because sooner or later, you must re-install Windows ( or other OS ) or deploy ghost files for reasons I mentioned above.

That should help a lot but the noise still exists … hey don’t tell me I should buy a new HDD and turn the old one to a Portable HDD. That should make sense since it aged. Anyway, when I google for this problem, I see that people say that Toshiba MK8025GAS itself is noisy too, and that is weakness of this product. Even when you buy a new one, it’s still noisier than other HDD… See http://forum.notebookreview.com/archive/index.php/t-79610.html

and http://www.notebookforums.com/archive/index.php/t-18277.html

In conclusion, if there is some other tweaks, like do some settings in BIOS or Windows to make HDD operate more quietly, yet lower the performance, or upgrade the firmware. Since the HDD now works fine except the noise, I should forget about that for a time. … Till I can purchase a new HDD, not this Toshiba anymore.

You know, when you buy a new laptop, you may not notice any trivial factors like this but after a long time using that can be your seriousness. You had better ask your friends or read any reviews of people who has already used it … to make your best choice. Read carefully the technical manual for which accessories they use.

There are another software I think it’s useful, but I haven’t tried yet HDD Capacity Restore Tool