Well, along with my new Dell 1330 laptop is the Samsung 320GB. As you can figure, this is a high-capacity hard drive. This thing also includes a free-fall sensor, which protects it from me accidentally dropping it or something. With my experience so far with my older laptop, I’ve dropped it once in 4 years. Even then, it was padded inside of a slipcover, inside of my cushioned bag. Of course, like most laptop hard drives today, it is 5400RPM, 8MB of cache and uses a 1.5Gbps SATA interface.
So, what is wrong with it? It seems to be working flawlessly, feels rather quick, but it has a really loud clicking noise. I haven’t really narrowed it down to when exactly it makes the noise. It makes the noise randomly! I just tried to copy a file of about 1GB over the network to my laptop…noiseless! Not a single sound, but when I least expect it, I heard this loud popping noise as if someone just smacked my laptop with a spoon! It’s that loud! This could be due to some sort of APM, but I will have to see.
As I’ve read on other reviews, this laptop should be "a welcome surprise for people with sensitive hearing". Well, most of the time, it is rather quiet. Just some of the time, it feels like the hard drive is going to jump out at you and bite off your nose. The first time I heard it, it actually startled me quite a bit because I was in a completely quiet room. Well, I’ll try to see if Dell can do anything about this.
320gb samsung · hard drive click · hm320ij · samsung loud clicking
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« Previous 1 2Ventzi Zhechev · February 27, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I got my HM320JI in Feb 2008 for my MacBook Pro. The clicking noise was there, but I kind of disregarded it, as it did not affect performance in any way.
However the clicks have become much more frequent lately and I got a bit worried. So I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status data. What I found is an extremely high Load_Cycle_Count: currently it’s at 983313 after a year of use. Its normalised value is at 003, which is barely above the threshold of 000.
Some surfing on the internet suggested that laptop drives are usually only rated for up to 600000 Load Cycles; meaning that I’m way beyond the life expectancy of the drive. However, Samsung give 3 year manufacturer warranty on the drives — I’d expect them to survive as much. The drive also reports having 5 bad sectors and 1 sector pending reallocation.
Unfortunately, Samsung doesn’t seem to manage warranty replacements/repairs directly; rather in case of trouble you have to contact the dealer from which you bought the drive. I did that and I really hope to get a replacement.
Sasquatch712 · April 7, 2009 at 11:14 am
Samsung Drives are a joke! I’ve got this HM320JI…I installed it in my MacBook in Nov 2008. Seemed fine when I first installed it, then about a month or so later, I noticed a random clicking noise. Didn’t think much of it until 4 days ago (4-4-09) when my MacBook stopped booting. I tried using the Mac OS X install DVD to verify/repair the drive but that failed.
When I connected the drive externally to rip the data off, no clicks whatsoever! I went to the Samsung website to get RAM instructions; that referred me to the place I purchased the drive from (DIT Computers) and they referred me BACK to Samsung! What a f*ckin joke! I’m NEVER purchasing anything from Samsung again! Western Digital All the Way!!!
Nils · May 30, 2009 at 10:34 am
My HM320JI has clicked al the time since I bought it(inside of a samsung laptop).
All the time there where no problems, but when I wanted to resume my laptop from sleeping it just hang up.
After booting windows in safemode I started the windows harddisk check. It repaired 3 files, 1 from my antivirus and 2 from windows.
After this windows didn’t boot again so I started the diskrepairing tool on a windows 7 RC 1 dvd. It got my windows to work again, but it seems I have a bad section on my drive now. My laptop freezes rather quickly.
I hope I can get it fix without reformarting the disk, and on top of that I hope I don’t have to change the disk.
Ronan Halpenny · December 8, 2009 at 6:42 am
Hi guys…
I have had this problem for a long time and only today found what seems to be a solution for it. I have only applied the solution minutes ago so I will have to monitor it for a while and see how it works but from the feedback on the link below it seems to have solved the problem for a lot of people…
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425
Post #1 details the solution and there are over 30 pages of replies to the solution. Take some time to read it and see if it might help you.
Regards,
Ro
mark steeves · January 7, 2010 at 12:49 am
Same clicking and crunching in second Samsung hm320ji in Dell xps m1530. As IT Tech I recommend to all customers to replace this hard drive. Can’t count the number of samsung hard drives that have cratered come across my bench. Hear a noise that makes you jump fix it and stop jumping. I’ve done ok using Seagate and W/D. Never never buy Samsung They should of stuck to cheap stereos and getto blasters.
mf powers · January 7, 2010 at 12:32 pm
looking for an external housing for a Samsung hm320ji — suggentions
pr · January 16, 2010 at 7:09 am
i have the same problem but with samsung hm160hc ata drive… they´re all crap
Jeremy · February 2, 2010 at 4:05 am
PLEASE READ THIS! IT MIGHT SAVE ALL OF YOUR DATA!
I came to this forum about 6 months ago when I bought my new hard drive. Like the author, everything was OK except the loud clicking noise. I convinced myself everything was fine – it’s just the heads parking or whatever… but yesterday my harddrive crashed. The click became a grind, my computer froze… and it broke.
Thankfully I had backed everything up, so nothing too important was lost.
But be warned. I had these exact same symptoms and my drive broke 6 months later. BACK UP YOUR DATA AND BUY A NEW HARD DRIVE!
David · February 15, 2010 at 6:50 am
Similar to all the above… I’ve been hearing nasty clicking for some time with my hm320ji which I bought to replace my tiny old 100gb wd drive in my Asus G1. The clicking is usually trigged by a hdd write operation and is accompanied by some occasional grinding whir/spin-up sound and some slight OS lockups/freezes. It’s becoming more frequent..
I took a backup last week, fortunately, since today the PC refused to boot; my hdd wasn’t even recognised in bios! I tipped the notebook upside down, and tried it again, and by fluke managed to get it to boot! But I’m sure I’m nearing the death of this drive.. so time for one more backup, investigate warranty options (3 years yeah?), and get a new one ASAP!
Syd Salmon · February 27, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I’ve been using two of the SAMSUNG HM320JI hard drives for over 18 months. One is my primary drive (MacBook) and the other is on my Firewire backup. It’s made the clicking noise right from the beginning. After checking it out, I decided to stick with it. I still hate the clicking, but I’ve never had any problem with the drives.
After reading the comments here, I’m getting a new drive. No sense in taking unnecessary risks.
angrycustomer · September 3, 2010 at 1:59 am
In 2009 I purchased a SAMSUNG HM320JI hard drive. It has never worked properly, continually experiencing corrupted FATs, failing to boot every time.
I’m very dissapointed in SAMSUNG’s warranty/return procedure. It seems that I cannot return the drive directly to Samsung and must chase the dealer.
An unreliable drive which Samsung should replace.
In view of the difficulty getting Samsung to honor the warranty I would not recommend Samsung hard drives.