Possible Power Management Causes Hard Drive Noise

Original date: May 17, 2009 3:32 PM by sonnik

If you're like me, there are certain times you'd like your hardware (usually a laptop) to be quiet and non-obtrusive. I even don't think it's necessary that laptops have as many LED indicators on them as they do now... sometimes "cool" defeats functionality. I personally like to use my laptop to listen to some tunes or podcasts as I travel. I haven't been able to solve the brightness issue, but I have been able to fix an annoyance noise on a new laptop I've purchased.

This particular laptop is an HP Pavilion DV4-1280us. I picked it up at Fry's Electronics. The source of the noise originated from the hard drive (this HP model includes a Western Digital 320GB drive).

Now normally, atypical noises are cause for concern when dealing with hard drives. However, as battery life and power management have become increasingly important, many newer hard drives (and configurations from the OEM) may be too aggressive and cause this noise.

I typically run with an A/C adaptor connected, so saving battery is not always essential. I'd rather have the "quiet".

Fortunately, this can be fixed with Linux's hdparm utility.

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

From the man page:

Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. Possible settings range from values 1 through 127 (which permit spin-down), and values 128 through 254 (which do not permit spin-down). The highest degree of power management is attained with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O performance with a setting of 254. A value of 255 tells hdparm to disable Advanced Power Management altogether on the drive (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).

I toyed around with values greater than 127, I tried 129 and 250. With 250, the clicking still occurred. With 254, the clicking stopped - but this likely retains some sort of power power management (just shy of disabling it all together).

Unfortunately, I can't tell you of a Windows equivalent that does this for sure off of the top of my head, but I am sure there are some free tools that do the same thing. If all else fails, try downloading a "Linux Live CD" that does the trick.

This won't solve all of your hard drive noise issues, but it worked for me. Hopefully, if you're faced by the same problem on a new laptop, this will do the trick for you.

EDIT: 12:10 PM 5/18/2009. I found "hdparm" (command-line) for Windows binary hosted here. I tested it out and it worked well under Vista. Note that you'll likely have best results if the command prompt is started with "Run as Adminstrator" selected.