Random Synapses

So here’s the story. Less than a year ago I bought two identical Dell Latitude C610 laptops. They have been previously used in a corporate environment, looked and worked very well, and offered sufficient portable computing power at a reasonable price (400€ + 19% tax). Adding Intel ProWireless miniPCI cards for 802.11b/g WiFi connectivity to the Intel Pentium III Mobile processors transformed them into Centrinos. And I was happy.

Until one of the hard drives died.

Both laptops were using 2.5″ IDE Hitachi hard drives with 12 and 20 GB respectively at 4200 rpm. They were slightly noisy and slow. Hitachi is an important player on the hard drive market, they even took over IBM’s hard drive production line. Their desktop drives are pretty good, but they have a history with poor laptop drives. I feared the day when the laptops’ drives will eventually fail, but I didn’t expect that day to come so soon. After a few days of fiddling with the faulty drive trying to recover some useful data off it and resurrect it with Hitachi’s diagnostic tools and finally with HDD Regenerator when nothing else worked, the drive finally became suffocated with bad sectors and could no longer be used, displaying a “Bad Drive” message at boot-up through S.M.A.R.T..

With the laptop still under warranty, the hard drive was replaced free of charge… with another Hitachi. And the new one made a high-pitched hiss sound all the time. Fearing another failure, I decided to shop around for replacement drives with faster access, bigger space and higher reliability. 4200 rpm drives are pretty much old technology, with the new 5400 rpm drives using state of the art motors; a 5400 rpm drive will not only perform slightly faster than a 4200 rpm drive, but should also reduce noise, heat and power consumption. I was searching for a “best buy” in terms of performance over cost and also keeping reliability as a key element in the equation. With Samsung, Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital lining up their 2.5″ hard drive models under my nose, I started comparing performance, reliability and price. What I did was to compare price/gigabyte for similar drives, for example finding the prices for the 60 GB, 5400 rpm, 2 MB cache drives, then dividing the price by 60 to find out how much I was paying for one gigabyte in each model. Similarily, I compared the 40, 60, 80 and 100 GB variants of the same line from each manufacturer, to find out which drive size provided the lowest cost.

The best cost/size turned out to be an 80 GB drive with 8 MB of cache. I had to rule out Toshibas for their insane prices over here, and Samsung for getting a mixed bag of reviews online. The two competitors left in the race were the Western Digital Scorpio and the Seagate Momentus 80 GB models. Having read many, many reviews online, including Tom’s Hardware’s Nine Notebook Hard Drives Make Their Debuts as well as forum discussions and buyers’ opinions, I picked the Western Digital Scorpio. It was also slightly cheaper than the Seagate, and it was also reported to perform slightly faster than the similar Momentus.

So here I was, with two identical laptops and two identical Western Digital hard drives, all excited about the huge portable storage space and performance. But my excitement turned to a two month long nightmare, when I discovered that both hard drives made a repetitive clicking sound every 2 seconds, making one of the laptops freeze up. The noise itself was not a problem, it was hardly audible, but it was making the computer freeze momentarily, even interrupting something as simple as displaying a menu. Diagnosing the problem was difficult since the clicking was an intermittent problem and I suspected the laptops to be faulty. After several tests, it became clear that both hard drives were having problems in one of the laptops and only one was clicking in the other laptop. Curiously enough, Western Digital’s excellent diagnostic utility could not find anything faulty with the drive, no physical errors, no S.M.A.R.T. failures. DiskMon from SysInternals.com did not find any relevant information regarding Windows’ accessing the drive repeatedly to cause the clicking. The noise did not occur when the hard drive was under heavy load, but when idling and having to read or write small amounts of data. I have tried everything, from installing several operating systems and updating drivers to changing power management settings and drive’s performance settings (maximum performance, maximum power saving or automatic). I even re-updated the laptops’ BIOS with the most recent version provided by Dell.

Nothing worked.

Then, in a moment of inspiration, I searched Dell’s downloads for Western Digital Scorpio. Surprise! Western Digital knew about the clicking sound of its Scorpio hard drives in Dell laptops and quietly provided Dell users with a firmware update for the hard drives of specific models to fix the problem. Dell didn’t list the update in older laptop models’ (like Latitude) lists of available downloads, but only in those models which had the Western Digital Scorpio drives as an original purchase option (the Inspiron series). The new firmware was not published on Western Digital’s website. I read the instructions closely and applied the firmware on both drives holding fingers crossed. (On Dell’s download site, this firmware update is named R99039, enter it in the search field.)

Success!! Well, partial success, at least. The hard drive that had problems with only one laptop was now working fine in both laptops without any clicking (apart from the occasional clicking caused by thermal recalibration, all hard drives do that). But the other hard drive was stubborned and continue to click.

Having no other ideas to solve the problem, I sent a question to a Western Digital technician through their Ask WD A Question customer support option. The answer came back promptly, telling me that the clicking noise is a known problem, the drive is deffective and needs to be sent back to be replaced. The drive went back through the national distribution chain to one of the importers, which held it for tests for 5 long weeks. I was really angry when they sent it back with the diagnostic “the drive is fine,” ignoring my detailed description of the intermittent problem and WD’s e-mail instructing to have the drive replaced, not repaired or tested. I was about to give them a call and escalate this problem to the European WD headquarters, when I thought I should run another search on Dell’s support site…

Surprise #2! A newer firmware update for the Western Digital Scorpio was quietly released for the same clicking problem, with the name R107305. I downloaded the update and installed the firmware on the faulty hard drive, keeping fingers and toes crossed, and…

IT WORKED!!! The clicking is gone. All operating systems perform flawlessly. The hard drive can now shine. The laptop is a joy to use. I’m happy.

Lessons learned? Don’t expect manufacturers and integrators to announce their faults; be on a constant lookout for updates, patches, announcements, drivers, firmwares for older equipment that can perform better. Don’t expect resellers to replace a drive without a fight, especially in “emerging markets” like Romania where customers’ rights are laughed at. When you run into a problem, take a step by step approach at finding the fault; be thorough, be open-minded and document everything you do.

Note for Dell users: There have been many reports on the Dell Forums regarding clicking noises from various hard drives in Dell laptops. In the wide variety of hardware available on the market, there is no such thing as perfect compatibility, and any two components that are supposed to work together may display all sorts of strange, unexpected problems. I was lucky to discover that Western Digital looks into such compatibility problems and offers fixes for them. Other companies might not do that, or might not be interested in supporting older models. Research thoroughly your hardware upgrades and take every piece of information with a grain of salt, including my own conclusions above — everyone is more or less biased.