BleepingComputer.com: Busy HDD sounds.

My HDD makes about 5 or 6 different types of sounds which can occur at any time, but mainly at startup. Some are hard to describe. Sometimes you might hear clicking, cha-ching, cha cha cha chee, cha cha cha chee....several times. Even a tock sound. Another one sounds like the pc is turning off. And then you get a lot of just real busy sounds. Can't describe.

I can only take these sounds as being a normal part of the Vista OS, but to me it gets ridiculous at times. My pc is about 4 months old. I upgraded it about the third week in August. I don't remember the original WD 160GB drive making all those busy sounds. My current drive is a WD Caviar GP 500GB SATA which is also supposed to use less energy.

What I can tell you so far is that when I checked the Task Manager, the CPU usage displayed FDServer.exe as being the most busy and is related to the AT@T Toolbar. Another action was explorer.exe. and dwm.exe also had some activity. And what I've found out about those two, dwn.exe and explorer.exe is that they have something to do with the Vista Aero feature and Windows operating environment respectively.

I assume it is normal like I said earlier. But of course it doesn't do it all the time or then I would take it as being a problem. Aside from all the sounds, the drive has performed just fine. Also, I did run a thorough test on the drive a few weeks ago and it was good to go. Does your drive make a lot of different busy sounds? Just curious. Thanks for the comments.

I have three hard drives in my computer, and they all make different noises. I'm also running vista, and I can tell you one hard drive is completely silent, one medium noise, and the biggest (300gb) can be kind of noisy at times. I don't know if I would really be too concerned unless you start experiencing performance issues. You could also look up reviews on the hard drive to see if other people are complaining about the noises to see if it is normal.

Maybe you could also check to see if the hard drive is secured in your case snuggly. They create a lot of vibrating while they're spinning.

Are these drives defragged at all/routinely?

How about running chkdsk /r on them?

Louis

Sterling14, on Nov 8 2008, 06:37 AM, said:

Sterling14. I did read some great reviews at Newegg. They had 103 reviews. 70 excellent, 14 good, 13 average, 5 poor, and 1 very poor. Some of the poor reviews said the drive was dead on arrival or others quit after a while. However that leaves 97 reviews as average to excellent. Here is what Techarp said: Recently, we picked up a 500 GB model for our tests and we were most impressed with its performance. Not only did it deliver a large storage capacity using only two platters, it also delivered very good performance numbers. In fact, it had the same platter-to-buffer transfer rates as the more expensive enterprise-grade Seagate Barracuda ES.

Anyway I hope for the best for this drive and it's only 3 months old. So time will tell. Appreciate the tip about checking the HDD to make sure it IS well secured.

hamluis, on Nov 8 2008, 10:37 AM, said:

Louis were you talking to me or Sterling14? I have only 1 drive. It is defragged weekly every Wednesday. I did not use chkdsk /r on mine. I actually used Western Digitals Data LifeGuard Diagnostics that I dl'd off the net. I used the thorough complete test too. Thanks.

My error, I get confused easily .

My experience is that drives will vary somewhat regarding noise produced. Drives get busy when they are being read by scanners or when chkdsk is running and they can create more noise at those times.

Louis

hamluis, on Nov 8 2008, 04:09 PM, said:

Well anyway, I won't worry about it for now. Thanks for the added info.