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General discussion

Quiet Notebook Hard Drive

Feb 18, 2004 5:54AM PST

Hi all.

My laptop hard drive is so noisy! I'm thinking of replacing it. Any suggestions on a quiet internal hard drive for a notebook? (40GB+).

Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Re:Quiet Notebook Hard Drive OR yours might be made quieter.
Feb 18, 2004 6:03AM PST

Some hard drives can have acoustic settings. The maker has utilities to slow the access time to draw less power of cut down the seek noise.

If yours has a bearing failure, I know the sound and any new drive will be quieter.

How about a make/model of what you have so the forum can see if there is tuning software for your drive acoustics?

Bob

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Re:Re:Quiet Notebook Hard Drive OR yours might be made quieter.
Feb 18, 2004 4:05PM PST

Thanks Bob. Its a Hitachi Travelstar 40GB 5400rpm. Any ideas?

Jessica

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Here's the Hitachi tool.
Feb 18, 2004 9:13PM PST

"Feature Tool (v1.92)
The Feature Tool allows you to control some of the features of our Deskstar and Travelstar high performance ATA hard disk drives and supports 48-bit addressing, so it will work with the new large capacity drives. This version adds support for our latest drives. The Feature Tool allows you to:

* Enable or disable the read-ahead or write cache.
* Change the drive Automatic Acoustic Management settings to the:
o Lowest acoustic emanation setting (Quiet Seek Mode), or
o Maximum performance level (Normal Seek Mode)."

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Remember this is to change the seek noise. If you have a constant whine or bearing problem, this will not have any effect. That's a high-performance drive for a laptop at 5400 RPM. We used to see much slower units so power consumption was lower, but then people are wanting desktop performance... You get the story.

Bob

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Re:Here's the Hitachi tool.
Feb 23, 2004 7:39AM PST

Thank you SO much!

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Is there such a tool for toshiba?
Oct 5, 2004 7:01PM PDT

Hi,

My Toshiba laptop's hard drive has a quite loud seek/write noise that frustrates me. Is there a tool to configure it for stealth rather than speed?

The hard drive is:
Toshiba MK4019GAX

Thanks!
Brian.