hd is making weird noises after 1 week use

[stickybytes]

i don't know if this is the norm for maxtor hard drives but im a little concerned. just last week, i purchased a maxtor 160gb hard drive. i formatted it and installed os. for the most part, the hard drive seemed pretty quiet. but just today, the hard drive started seeking really loud. it just suddenly became loud and ive only used it for 1 week! is this a cause for alarm or am i over reacting. are maxtor hd's like this as in, after one week of use they become loud as heck?

 

[baumerz]

It appears Maxtor is having problems at this point in time. Return it right away. the noise level should not change with use.

 

[stickybytes]

Originally posted by: baumerz
It appears Maxtor is having problems at this point in time. Return it right away. the noise level should not change with use.

could you elabotrate?

 

[baumerz]

The bottom line is the noise level would only change if there was a problem.

 

[uOpt]

I just lost two out of 3 Maxtors I got in March. While I run RAID5 the loss of two disks in too short a time to showel things around actually made me lose data. My Quake3 savegames are gone, now I am pissed

One of them made high-pitch noise when not seeking prior to failing.

And it was the 160 GBs Maxtors, too, so I highly recommend return and exchange for Seagate.

 

[stickybytes]

just to be more specific, my hard drive makes a somewhat low pitch, sound when it seeks. sounds like a motor spinning. it does not make noises when it is idle however.

are there any tests that i can run on this to make sure this drive is good? i think i heard about a program called s.m.a.r.t. or was it smart drives?

 

[bacillus]

If you go to the Maxtor web site then you can download their hard drive utility called POWERMAX

 

[uOpt]

ATA drives have a lot of information that you can request over the controller. You can see data like soft (corrected) read errors. Soft error going up is a sure sign of a dying hard drive.

I don't know what tools you use under Windows to get that info, though.