[naza911]

I got a problem in trying to work out for sure if my hard drive is
failing. Problems began a few weeks ago when the 160GB Maxtor Drive
began to make a sort of grinding noise. Just to help you out a bit,
its the sound that happens after the three clicks in the sound clip.

http://www.thenetworkadministrator.c...damage%202.wav


There was not as such clicking, but just a loud sound. I know in
normal operation drives do make this sound, but this was much louder.
Anyway, I did a defrag of the had drive and it went away. Today it
came back, I straight away got all my data of the drive. During which
it made the sound not all the time but at some files, sounded rather
random. I left the data on the drive and did a disk check in DOS. At
the stage 2(Verifying Indexes) it made the sound at around 30% and
80%, everytime( I repeated the check a good few times). So then I wipe
and formatted the disk again. Ran the Seatools Program and did all the
tests, it passed all of them. So now I put some data on the drive and
do the the same check on the disk. I can hear the sound but I would
say that would be normal operation. HDD Life reports 55% Health, with
all SMART Tools reporting everything is fine.
Pasting the SMART info was messy, so I upped a SS.




The HDD was brought in February so still in warranty made by Seagate
although branded Maxtor. I now cannot get it to make the sounds as it
did before, I have done benchmarks and read/writes test's practically
for the last 4 hours, but all seems fine.

So was the sort of sound I am reporting just due to messed up file
system, which was messing with the head? I did do many full chkdsk's
with the data, before the wipe, I want to be fairly sure there is a
problem before sending the drive away and wasting money, if they claim
there is no fault.

Thanks for your help.

[Hybr!d]

Backup anything important NOW, the drive sounds on it's way out. When they go they go suddenly so backup, before it's too late.

Seagate/Maxtor are crap drives too, if you can, replace it with a Western or Samsung.