strange sound from hard disk

[SNJ]

it is very old HDD. whenever i do some heavy work like open many many tabs in chrome or opening adobe reader or saving a file... heavy scratching noise comes from the hard disk.. like 2 rough surface rubbing on each other?

What to do? Is hard disk failing? How much time before it totally fails?

 

[SNJ]

no help..?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Some hard drives are just noisier than others. You may simply be hearing the seek noises.

However, if the noise has recently gotten worse or louder, then indeed, your HDD may be about to fail.

I hope that you have your data backed up.

 

[Morbus]

I have a Seagate Barracuda with a year that does this and I believe it's normal... Though I wouldn't mind if I could test it somehow with an application or something. Is there even such a thing?

 

[mfenn]

no help..?

When you're posting past midnight US Eastern time, most of the regular East Coast and European posters have gone off to bed. Don't expect an immediate response. Bumping your own thread within 4 hours is frowned upon.

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator

 

[Paperdoc]

You have a "very old hard drive", and that leads me to think thusly:
1. Head seeking on this unit may be noisier than on newer HDD's.
2. How old is the rest of the system? How much RAM do you have? Why ask?
3. If you have limited RAM and open a lot of large apps, the system will go to work moving data to and from the Virtual Memory Paging File on your HDD. This will cause a lot of head seeking. Maybe that is what you are hearing, as VirtualLarry has suggested.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Most manufacturers offer a disk tool so get it from their website and run it to check drive health.

 

[SNJ]

Some hard drives are just noisier than others. You may simply be hearing the seek noises.

However, if the noise has recently gotten worse or louder, then indeed, your HDD may be about to fail.

I hope that you have your data backed up.

this noise did not emanate when my computer was new.
If noise now means that hard disk is failing then i will do backup. Thank u.

 

[SNJ]

You have a "very old hard drive", and that leads me to think thusly:
1. Head seeking on this unit may be noisier than on newer HDD's.
2. How old is the rest of the system? How much RAM do you have? Why ask?
3. If you have limited RAM and open a lot of large apps, the system will go to work moving data to and from the Virtual Memory Paging File on your HDD. This will cause a lot of head seeking. Maybe that is what you are hearing, as VirtualLarry has suggested.

1. yes i also think so.
2. I purchased this in Feb 2008. 1 GB RAM.
3. Yes i know page file what i am worried abt is the ghrrrr ghrrrr noise.

How much time before this HDD fails completely?

I have a Seagate Barracuda with a year that does this and I believe it's normal... Though I wouldn't mind if I could test it somehow with an application or something. Is there even such a thing?

link to download application?

 

[mfenn]

You're almost certainly going to be paging if you're running a modern version of Firefox or Chrome with only 1 GB of RAM. Browsers were less memory intensive when you first bought the machine, so you wouldn't have been paging then.

I don't see the drive model that you have mentioned anywhere. That would be great help.

 

[SNJ]

You're almost certainly going to be paging if you're running a modern version of Firefox or Chrome with only 1 GB of RAM. Browsers were less memory intensive when you first bought the machine, so you wouldn't have been paging then.

I don't see the drive model that you have mentioned anywhere. That would be great help.

It is a Hitachi Deskstar HDS721.

 

[mfenn]

It is a Hitachi Deskstar HDS721.

That's an older drive, but it is not insanely old. Still, I would expect it to make some significant noise when seeking. Here's a link to Hitachi's diagnostic tool, WinDFT.