I'm taking the plunge and facing an issue I've been avoiding for a few weeks: noise from my hard drive (using antiX 7.5 on an older Dell Latitude cpx laptop). I've done research on hard drive noises and can't decide whether mine is the normal sound of a hard drive operating, whether it's a sign of iminent failure, or whether antiX has a power management feature that causes the hard drive to spin down at some point. Or is there some other hard drive activity that is part of antiX normal performance?

Symptoms: Shortly after first-boot of the morning or after a period of inactivity, the hard drive will make a soft rattle(emphasis: soft, but clearly audible--very similar to the sound of spin-down at shutdown). Other than this, the machine performs normally without any problems at all.

Any ideas would help. Or just let me know: what kind of sound does your hard drive make??

I would start backing up and syncing to another machine to be safe. There is a thread here about spinning down HD's , it could be your issue. EITHER WAY------BACK UP NOW!!!!!!------

Yeah, erie, I'm backing up now like I'm supposed to have been doing all along. __{{emoticon}}__

The thread you're thinking of may be this one:


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There's this comment:

"i discovered the solution to a niggling problem on my Antix laptop.....the hard drive would"CLUNK" every 10 seconds...a very annoying sound... This forum solved my HDD noise problem by telling me to turn OFF the acpi feature...this worked."

But I can't find anything similar to my case of just that one soft rattle very soon after first boot into antiX. I don't want to ditch the HD if this is normal or if others have experienced the same thing. I guess there's no real answer (too many variables like HD type, age, past usage,"just the way some drives work," etc.). So I guess I'm in for some nervous typing for a while. Aah. Sweat stains on the keyboard!

I found the thread I was thinking about:


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Might help to diagnose the issue if there is one.