Force Hard Drive Off/Sleep/Low Power

[Zytrex]

I think one of my drives is dying. The normal hum you hear from drives is being replaced by a louder whine.

The BIOS Smart Monitor says the drives are all fine, but every once in a while (say, every other week or so) I'll go to my computer and see that it restarted and is unable to boot because it doesn't see NTFS (or something like that) indicating that it either cannot see the system disk or cannot properly read from it.

This may mean that it's the system disk that's dying, but if another drive on the cable has issues it can interfere. Either way, turning the computer off and then back on fixes the problem, for a few weeks anyway.

The problem (aside from a possibly failing drive) is that I have four hard drives and no real idea which one is making the noise. And the noise is only there on rare occasions, so restarting the computer with only one drive plugged in at a time wouldn't get me anywhere.

So my idea is to force the drives into sleep mode, one at a time, until the sound I'm hearing goes away. Then I would know which drive was making the sound. I've looked but cannot find any software that can do this. Can anyone help me?

Also, if anyone knows another method to find out which drive might be dying, please tell me.

 

[ski]

Remove the computer's cover, and listen to each HD by placing one end of a straw against it, and the other end in your ear. The noisy one will be very obvious.

 

[Zytrex]

Wow, thanks. I would have never thought of something like that. I'll try it out.

 

[Zytrex]

Well I've tried that but I couldn't hear a difference. Any other ideas?

 

[ski]

It could be caused by a dying fan.