G752VS Hitachi Drive Failure ?

[BogdanCiulei]

The secondary drive on my G752VS started making weird scratching noises very often. I am fairly sure this didn't happen in the begining ( I have this laptop for 2 weeks now ) . The cause might be related to me removing the Asus software , but since then I had reinstalled it and also perfomed a system reset, still the sound persists.
The noise is similar to when a hard drive comes back from sleep , removing the heads from the park position

According to Crystal Disk Info, the drive is a Hitachi - HGST HTE721010A9E630 and the SMART data shows it to be ok for now.
I almost never use the second drive, still the noise comes up regularly, not only at boot time but every now and the.
I am afraid it will fail soon.
Should I send the laptop to service ? Is there any tool , Asus utility , Hitachi utility or something to make this behavior stop ?

Thanks

[httuner]

BogdanCiulei wrote:
The secondary drive on my G752VS started making weird scratching noises very often. I am fairly sure this didn't happen in the begining ( I have this laptop for 2 weeks now ) . The cause might be related to me removing the Asus software , but since then I had reinstalled it and also perfomed a system reset, still the sound persists.
The noise is similar to when a hard drive comes back from sleep , removing the heads from the park position

According to Crystal Disk Info, the drive is a Hitachi - HGST HTE721010A9E630 and the SMART data shows it to be ok for now.
I almost never use the second drive, still the noise comes up regularly, not only at boot time but every now and the.
I am afraid it will fail soon.
Should I send the laptop to service ? Is there any tool , Asus utility , Hitachi utility or something to make this behavior stop ?

Thanks

That's completely normal; its just seems much louder on a laptop. Do a disk defrag; and use something like CrystalDiskInfo which can be downloaded for free(google it) to check the health of the drive; if there is anything wrong with it; it'll tell you.

[BogdanCiulei]

Crystal Disk Info says its fine , for now. But I;m afraid it is going to fail soon with this thing going on.
I've had other laptops and none of it had continue hard head parking sounds. Maybe its particular to Hitachi, I dont know, but it is too often to be right.

[Dreamonic]

The HDD audible *click* sound is the head positioning/parking. Completely normal, and is apparently "aggressive" with Hitachi HDDs, which are commonly used in ROG Notebooks. In the G752VS, using an unlocked BIOS even, you can disable this audible *click* sound by changing the HDD APM value to something higher than default; CrystalDiskInfo allows this and you can follow the guide here.

SIDE NOTE: You can try other utilities such as this one here until you find one that works for you.

[BogdanCiulei]

I tried doing that with Crystal Disk Info but no luck. The sound persists. Its either that Hitachi has a particular way of setting power management, or that there's another cause.

Does anyone else experience this ? Does anything work for you ?

[httuner]

BogdanCiulei wrote:
I tried doing that with Crystal Disk Info but no luck. The sound persists. Its either that Hitachi has a particular way of setting power management, or that there's another cause.

Does anyone else experience this ? Does anything work for you ?

I have this one mine; and still do; after a while I just didn't allow it to bug me anymore; I added a nVme SSD and that helped with the noise considering I no longer use the HDD for programs other than for storage* (music; ect)

I do have a game installed on the HDD and when I'm playing it the read/writes it does; do make a lot of noise. You kinda just have to live with it? Or go with a slower 5400rpm drive; those tend to be quieter;

[BogdanCiulei]

The sound does not come from reading but from head parking as it has been said.
I think the reason that Crystal Disk Info or other tools like hdparm ( tried it ) do not work, is that something keeps resetting the APM setting of the drive, and this started happening only after I reset the system.

I am not ready to replace the hdd with a ssd yet, also the system is brand new, I think it is fair to be expecting more from it (2500 euros retail)

[Clintlgm]

Yea but is it worth the stress of a RMA for a $60 hard drive? I just pulled the Hitachi 1TB from my G752VW and put it in my G75VW it made no noise in the 752 nor is it making any noise in the G75 its only been in use as a data drive and is only a week or so old. The 1 TB Samsung 850 Pro that came out of the G75 is now happily residing in my new G752.

[Dreamonic]

This is going to be one of those situations where you'll need to try more APM disable tools until you get one that works for your HDD then. As you probably know by now, not every tool works. The sleep function does in fact reset the APM values each time but there are ways around that depending on the tool and startup options.

Searching around also brings up newer versions of the Intel RST drivers being a potential cause as well, so you could try older versions and see if any make a difference.

Good luck!

[BogdanCiulei]

Yes, maybe its not worth the hassle of waiting several weeks for the issue to be "solved" by Asus service center. On the other hand , I want to use this machine for work too, and I'm not too happy about the potential of loosing years worth of documentation and source files. I have backups but I was hoping for more reliability and less worries.

Call me paranoid but I am sure the problem is caused by something software. It doesn't happen when Windows is in minimal Safe Mode, or if I boot from Universal Boot CD , did that to test various things.
Tried downgrading to IRST drivers that are in the eSupport folder, it didn't solve the problem