Hard drive - odd noises ("whistling" sort of noise)

[hitman012]

Recently, my hard drive has begun making some odd noises. It's a 120GB Seagate Barracuda. You may recall me making a previous thread) about its behaviour.

Initially (when installed in my old case) it worked fine - I couldn't hear it and it ran nice and fast. After I changed it over to my new case, it seemed to make a lot of seeking noises. I don't know if this is related (I think it's probably the accoustics of my new, larger case).

Starting yesterday, it began to make a whistling sort of noise when heavy disk activity is commencing, such as a disk scan or a large file being opened (I initially noticed this when opening a large Access database). When I heard it then, it sounded like a high pitched rapid seeking noise, and it got higher pitched until the file was completely opened.

I took a recording of the noise which can be listened to here (500kb mp3). The noise starts about 9 seconds in. I've also noticed a slight decrease in performance (Windows seems to run a little slower, etc, but this could just be me thinking that way, or perhaps I need to defragment).

I have backed up all the relevant data across a home network to a 30gb drive on another computer.

Can anyone give any insight as to what this noise can be?Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Jack

 

[micker377]

Definatly run defrag. If this doesn't help, pull the hard drive and place it on an insulated stand (cardboard box), hook up and run to see how loud it really is. Could be bearings, could be normal noise - amplified by the case.

 

[hitman012]

Thanks for your quick response. Just a minute ago, I ran Seagate's SeaTools diagnostic program and instructed it to test everything.

The test reported that everything had passed except for my partition, for which it said:

File Structure Test Result:

Partition 1 (NTFS (120 GB) ) Result: Failed with critical Errors

I am wondering if this is caused by a physical problem (perhaps a bearing problem, as you said), or if the increased seeking and strange noise is caused by the drive trying to read a filesystem with problems in it?

 

[micker377]

I'd back-up anything important and re-format. I know that's a lot of trouble. That's why I'm ignoring a small problem I have with Outlook Express, I'm waiting until I HAVE to re-format! I do keep Ghost image (full system) back-ups.

 

[cdogg]

If the old case still has a motherboard, CPU, and RAM, I would install it there again as a quick test before formatting. At least that would rule out acoustics...

~cdogg
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