For the first few months I had my Samsung SP1614N drive (IDE, 8mb cache, with JVC motor and FDB), it was absolutely, beautifully silent ... I never heard a peep out of it, including no audible seek noise. But lately, I seem to have more and more days when the drive makes a relatively loud seek noise. It's not a mechanical clunking sound ... it's more like the sound of quickly sliding a piece of paper a short way across a tabletop. But it's fairly loud, at least compared to the way the drive was before.
What's weird is that some days I am unable to hear the drive at all (even when I'm listening carefully for it), but on other days every seek is clearly audible from the moment the machine is booted. The percentage of noisy days like the latter seems to be steadily on the increase, and the audible level of the noise seems to have been gradually increasing as well. I'm not getting any drive errors in the system logs. I do have a perception that the drive is responding more slowly when it's making that noise, but that perception may also be merely a psychological effect, because the increasing frequency and volume of the audible seek noise is beginning to become an annoyance (perhaps because I don't know what if anything it may indicate as to the health of my drive).
What do you think? Is this a reasonable result of the drive "breaking in" (I bought it new and have had it running for about five months now), or should I be backing up my data more frequently and preparing to have to replace the drive?
What's weird is that some days I am unable to hear the drive at all (even when I'm listening carefully for it), but on other days every seek is clearly audible from the moment the machine is booted. The percentage of noisy days like the latter seems to be steadily on the increase, and the audible level of the noise seems to have been gradually increasing as well. I'm not getting any drive errors in the system logs. I do have a perception that the drive is responding more slowly when it's making that noise, but that perception may also be merely a psychological effect, because the increasing frequency and volume of the audible seek noise is beginning to become an annoyance (perhaps because I don't know what if anything it may indicate as to the health of my drive).
What do you think? Is this a reasonable result of the drive "breaking in" (I bought it new and have had it running for about five months now), or should I be backing up my data more frequently and preparing to have to replace the drive?
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