Hard Drive Noise

I recently started hearing a small beep like noise from my hard drive. I dont think its ever been there before as im sure i would have noticed it. I've heard of noise from IDE drives but mines SATA. I sounds like the arm that has the read head on it is moving but it souldn't be writing anything. saving, copying, or deleting files has no effect on the sound. Its on for four seconds then off for two exactly and never varies. Is this normal and I've never heard it?

I'm fairly sure it's the HDD but I could be mistaken. Again, its very soft and it took me 5 minutes to realize its coming from the computer.

Hard drive noises are almost never good. Keep whatever is on that drive backed up, and keep a replacement handy. Once it fails, there is almost no way to get the data back w/o dropping some serious moolah. It is for this very reason that I keep all of my drives that have data on them mirrored.

and now it stopped

Quote:

thanks for tip. i have everything important backed up anyways

Usually whining noises like that are caused by the arm crashing into the platters. Most newer HDD's have technology built in to detect platter crashes and will immediately move the arm away to "park" mode to prevent damage. A bearing could be going bad as well. Check your event viewer for any controller errors...if there are any, there will likely be a ton of them. Run chkdsk as well.

well it started again. chkdsk shows no errors. event viewer shows 8 controller errors and 4 errors during a paging operation. is this anything to be worried about or just typical stuff? all the dates were either April 14th or 30th and no others.


and i know know the noise goes on and off because its off again

If it's off and on, that's more indicative of a head problem than a bearing. Controller errors are NOT normal. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Oh god, I thought you meant your HDD stopped working when you said it stopped...

Scary!

Anyways, is it more of an electronic beep?  Are you sure it's coming from your hard drive specifically?

Regardless, do as Static says and get a backup just in case.  I run redundant because I've had a bad experience before.  I don't want to take any chances.

im thinking of running redundant but i really have no idea how to set that up. is that RAID 1? how do i go about this and can I do it even though 1 drive has data on it already (will the second just add when i add something or will it write all the old files to itself?)?

ive never used multiple HDDs before

and the noise kind of sounds like someone breathing deeply in another room (thats what i thought it was at first). imaging a small electronic motor spinning very slowly