Hard drive noise

[coldmeat]

So I decided to defrag my hard drive since I haven't done it once since I last reformatted which was about 1.5 years ago. It's 500gb and it was full except for 3gb which I didn't realize, so I had to do it again when I freed up more space.

It's been about a week and a half since I've done it, and ever since it makes a lot of noise (it was pretty much silent before) and I've noticed that it's slowed down.

Is this a sign that it could be about to fail? Should I be worried?

 

[graysky]

Describe the noise... clicking or chattering? Does it do it idle or when read/write?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: coldmeat
It's 500gb and it was full except for 3gb which I didn't realize, so I had to do it again when I freed up more space.

That's a horribly low percentage of free space for that size drive.
My guess is that defragging took a very long time.

 

[coldmeat]

Originally posted by: graysky
Describe the noise... clicking or chattering? Does it do it idle or when read/write?

More of a chattering I guess, kind of a grinding noise as well. It only happens when it's reading/writing.

 

[coldmeat]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: coldmeat
It's 500gb and it was full except for 3gb which I didn't realize, so I had to do it again when I freed up more space.

That's a horribly low percentage of free space for that size drive.
My guess is that defragging took a very long time.

Ya, I wasn't really paying attention to the analysis when I started it. I downloaded diskeeper trial, and it worked on it over night, and when I woke up it was finished but barely made any progress. So I cleared ~50gb then did it again.

 

[graysky]

I'm no expert, but if it's not doing it while idle, that's a good sign. Have you run a SMART check via smartmontools? Try a long test and see the results. Also, how many hours are on the HDD (this is something you'll get by the smartmontools report)?

Example:


Sorry, I can't get the code tag to work right.

 

[coldmeat]

3 hours for a long test? Can I use the hard drive while the test is running for something like a movie?

And it said 6192 hours after I ran the short test.

 

[Rubycon]

Run a CHKDSK and see what your file allocation unit (cluster) size is.

If it's 512 bytes then defragging is painfully slow and will use a TON of memory. Usually this happens if a drive was formatted FAT32 from the beginning and converted to NTFS using the convert utility.

On NON OS drives it's always better (if the above is true) to do a fresh format with 4096 byte (4K) clusters. Performance will be much better.

 

[coldmeat]

So there were no errors or anything when it completed the long test.