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Question

faint scratching/ticking noise from laptop

Jan 3, 2020 5:50PM PST

Hi, so i recently bought a new laptop, an asus tuf fx505dy and i noticed the left of the laptop is making a faint ticking/scratching sound. It isn't very loud but it's still noticeable and irritating. This happens whenever I'm downloading or running a game from the hard drive. It also happens when shutting off the laptop, booting it up. There's no sound when I download to the ssd. The screen also occasionally freezes for a split second and the pad feels unresponsive. Is this the sound normal or should I just send the laptop back? Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
When I read your post's title I thought "Hard drive noise."
Jan 3, 2020 5:59PM PST

And yes, Windows will appear to freeze up as the HDD recalibrates or something else.

Be sure to look at your Speccy report or share it here (link to follow.)

WHY? Because this behavior has been linked to so many HDDs with numbers in the high thousands in Smart values 01 and 07. Why this is has so many priors I don't write about it everytime this comes up.

Read how to share the report if you can't find the values or Waldo:
https://www.piriform.com/docs/speccy/using-speccy/publishing-a-speccy-profile-to-the-web

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This is the bit of the speccy report on the hard drive
Jan 4, 2020 6:15PM PST

I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking for here, I also ran crystal disk info and it didn't highlight any issues. I recorded the sound, had to turn up the volume to hear it though, I did more research and someone said its normal for new disks to make noise, is this true? Thanks.
https://youtu.be/N68oUJrgUik

Hard drives
ST1000LM035-1RK172
Manufacturer: Seagate
Heads: 16
Cylinders: 121,601
Tracks: 31,008,255
Sectors: 1,953,520,065
SATA type: SATA-III 6.0Gb/s
Device type: Fixed
ATA Standard: ACS3
Serial Number: WL1Q8HNX
Firmware Version Number: SDM4
LBA Size: 48-bit LBA
Power On Count: 30 times
Power On Time: 1.9 days
Speed: 5400 RPM
Features: S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ
Max. Transfer Mode: SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Used Transfer Mode: SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Interface: SATA
Capacity: 931 GB
Real size: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes
RAID Type: None
S.M.A.R.T
Status: Good
Temperature: 24 °C
Temperature Range: OK (less than 50 °C)
S.M.A.R.T attributes
01
Attribute name: Read Error Rate
Real value: 0
Current: 83
Worst: 64
Threshold: 6
Raw Value: 000C7C2B73
Status: Good
03
Attribute name: Spin-Up Time
Real value: 0 ms
Current: 99
Worst: 99
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
04
Attribute name: Start/Stop Count
Real value: 49
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 20
Raw Value: 0000000031
Status: Good
05
Attribute name: Reallocated Sectors Count
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 36
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
07
Attribute name: Seek Error Rate
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 253
Threshold: 45
Raw Value: 00000F2636
Status: Good
09
Attribute name: Power-On Hours (POH)
Real value: 1d 21h
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 000000002D
Status: Good
0A
Attribute name: Spin Retry Count
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 97
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
0C
Attribute name: Device Power Cycle Count
Real value: 30
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 20
Raw Value: 000000001E
Status: Good
B8
Attribute name: End-to-End error / IOEDC
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 99
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
BB
Attribute name: Reported Uncorrectable Errors
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
BC
Attribute name: Command Timeout
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
BD
Attribute name: High Fly Writes (WDC)
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
BE
Attribute name: Airflow Temperature
Real value: 20 °C
Current: 80
Worst: 50
Threshold: 40
Raw Value: 0014130014
Status: Good
BF
Attribute name: G-sense error rate
Real value: 1
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000001
Status: Good
C0
Attribute name: Power-off Retract Count
Real value: 4
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000004
Status: Good
C1
Attribute name: Load/Unload Cycle Count
Real value: 331
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 000000014B
Status: Good
C2
Attribute name: Temperature
Real value: 20 °C
Current: 20
Worst: 50
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000014
Status: Good
C5
Attribute name: Current Pending Sector Count
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
C6
Attribute name: Uncorrectable Sector Count
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
C7
Attribute name: UltraDMA CRC Error Count
Real value: 0
Current: 200
Worst: 200
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
F0
Attribute name: Head Flying Hours
Real value: 1d 8h
Current: 100
Worst: 253
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000020
Status: Good
F1
Attribute name: Total LBAs Written
Real value: 400,080,500
Current: 100
Worst: 253
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0017D8BE74
Status: Good
F2
Attribute name: Total LBAs Read
Real value: 544,933,669
Current: 100
Worst: 253
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 00207B0725
Status: Good
FE
Attribute name: Free Fall Protection
Real value: 0
Current: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 0
Raw Value: 0000000000
Status: Good
Partition 0
Partition ID: Disk #0, Partition #0
Disk Letter: D:
File System: NTFS
Volume Serial Number: 28A66457
Size: 931 GB
Used Space: 97 GB (10%)
Free Space: 834 GB (90%)

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That's not a drive you want in a PC.
Jan 4, 2020 10:29PM PST

At least one you want to perform. Notice 01 and 07 exceed the thresholds.

Again, I won't write much here as it's been done so many times so the short version is the HDD will cause issues. Also the drive has not "failed." So they won't replace it over performance issues.