Noise when accessing external drives

[superfastkyle]

The weirdest thing is happening and I am getting quite worried. Whenever I am accessing my external USB hard drives (I have 4 different ones) and no matter which one I use I hear this high pitched noise which I believe is coming from the main case but am not sure its so high its not really directional. I don't seem to hear it putting my ear to the external cases. So it scares me my main hard drive might be going bad. I am using an external pci usb2 card, so the only possible thing I can think of is could this be a power supply issue somehow? I've been trying to backup as much as I can off my main drive but don't know what else to do. If I play movies/music files from the main hard drive I don't hear anything out of the ordinary, but as I soon as I start playing some from the usb drive it comes back. I've been backing up as much as I can but don't have any free space so dvd's is really slow. Operating system is xp. Is there anything weird xp does while using external devices that would make my internal hard drive noisy? I've even disabled the swap file but I still hear the noise

Edit: This almost can't be just a coincidence as when I have one of my external drives windows open in explorer no other programs open. I browse to a directory I hear the noise goes away after 15-25 seconds. Click another directory and it repeats. This is a very annoying noise it just about drives me crazy. I almost have stopped watching movies on my computer entirely because of it. I guess I need to take my case apart and see where the noise is coming from. it will be a huge pain though as its a htpc and its not fun to get back together.

 

[superfastkyle]

The sound is definitely coming from the internal hard drive so if anyone has any suggestions at all... no matter how much I try to tax the internal drive without a usb drive connected it never makes any noise. So I'm almost wondering if I should not hook them up at all I would hate to be damaging my internal hard drive.

 

[Mango1970]

My 2 cents worth: You got to open that sucker up. Are the fans spinning up for some reason? Or are there cables touching the fans at all? I know I can reproduce a weird experience on an older computer that when I game on it this very freaking annoying sounds comes from the video card. It's not the fan bur rather "electrical". I guess under load it has issues. One other suggestion is that if your mobo supports Smart Drive or whatever it's called that detects if your hardrives are ok on boot up, enable that and see what it says. Have you tried running a benchmark like HD tach and seeing what you get for all your drives to make sure they are running at normal speeds? I know when my older HD died on me a while back, for weeks it exhibited weird behavior but mostly it was slllllow as all hell and took for ever to be recognized.

Are the external drives being powered by an external power adapter you plug into your wall? or powered from the actual computer through USB? Not even sure if USB could power a HD just wondering. Can you just try one USB drive but change the ports you plug into (front VS rear or reverse) to see if it's a particular USB port that is popped or draining?)