Here is the sound anatomy:

Here is how the sound is interpreted in Windows2000 performance monitor; the blue graph shows actual disk writes...

Click the links below either to play the sound WAV immediatelly /291Kb/ or download it in compressed form as a ZIP file /about 30Kb/:

click here to play sound

click here to download file

Hitachi DK23CA-20 20 Gigabyte HDD

GOOD NEWS! Yesterday /12-14-2001/ Dell released a firmware update for the above mentioned problem. I personally don't have that drive anymore, but the current owners will certainly appreciate the patch. Would call it a clear victory, since Dell didn't want to admit that there is anything wrong with these drives for 6 months...

From the description of the update:"Hitachi DK23CA Family 10/20/30GB Notebook Hard Drives (DK23CA-10) (DK23CA-20) (DK23CA-30) Reduction of frequent acoustic clicking noise driven by hard drive load/unload mechanism."

You can download it from the link below:

Firmware update.