Vaio RC102 - Noisy Hard Drive

[phoenix198]

My Vaio RC102 has had a less than silent hard drive since new (4 months).

It has always 'chattered' but now seems to be getting noisier - my perception as least. There are no other symptoms of drive failure (lost or bad sectors, failure to boot, read/write errors, SMART failures, etc) but I am nervous about a disk failure.

Also, for some reason Device Manager only shows it as 'Volume 0' rather than showing the hard drive manufacturer and model number

Do I have something configured incorrectly, or is the hard drive at significant risk of failing?

[Blencogo]

Your RC102 should be almost silent. You may occasionally hear the drives 'chatter' - but this should be barely audible but each Vaio will be slightly different.

If you are worried, I would raise a case with Vaio-Link Support and register your concern.

The reason Device Manager lists your drive as Volume 0 is because you have two hard drives configured in RAID 0. Your Vaio writes to both hard drives at once putting 'Stripes' of data alternately onto each drive. In windows this looks like a single drive. This gives very fast read/write times.

You probably have two Western Digital 160 GB drives. If you want to see the details of your individual drives: -

Start -> All Programs -> Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager -> Intel Matrix Storage Console and double-click on each drive.

[phoenix198]

Thanks Blencogo, didn't realise that there was a RAID array in the RC102.

I've done as you suggest, and raised a case with Vaio Support

[kee-lo_]

Lets hope the noise is because it's got two drives and not failure

[Attillia]

I had the same problem. My RC102 is about 13 months old now. I sent it to Sony for repair of the hard drives....they replaced the processor and motherboard! lol Turns out the hard drives were fine! I just never realised the hard drive sound becuase my previous computers had very loud fans. As time passes though you will get used to it and barely hear it...besides even with the occassional sound the RC102 is very silent!

Enjoy!

[Blencogo]

I thought my RC102 was developing noisy hard drives but discovered the silver casing (with the Vaio logo that lights up) that contains the hard drives was a slightly loose fit.

This clips off - there are two catches at the back in the 'hole' through the Vaio - and can be refitted with a bit if padding. My Vaio is nearly silent again.

[phoenix198]

Regret to say that I got nowhere with Sony support. Problem is that 'noisy hard drives' (and PC noise levels in general) is a very subjective issue.

A previous poster commented that he thought the RC-102 to be a very quiet PC. Even without my (to my hearing) excessively noisy hard drives, I don't consider the RC-102 to be particularly quiet. Its not loud either, but compared to my VGN-VA1 there is a lot of fan noise, especially from the graphics card. I'm surprised that Sony didn't choose a passively cooled graphics card, but then again, there isn't a lot of room between the PCI-E 16x slot and the inner case divider.

Biencogo: thanks for your suggestion, unfortunately it didn't work for me - my noise is definitely coming from the hard drives rather than part of the case vibrating.