Hard Drive Noise: Louder since going to Vista?

I'm a Inspiron 6400 user, had it for nearly 10 months now. I decided to go onto Vista yesterday night, from XP. Everything seems to be fine, but I seem to notice that the hard drive noise is getting louder compared to XP. Is it due to Vista overworking the drive? I've disabled indexing and all, but still the noise is there. It sounds like a fan is running, just that it comes from the hard drive.

Anyone able to probably relate how loud their hard drive is when running either XP or Vista? I would like to reiterate again that this is not any sort of clicking noise, but basically a humming sort of noise, like a fan is running. It is slightly softer than the fan running at slow speed, but still audible. I just don't want to revert back to XP again just to compare the noise level, but it seems to me that the noise has gone louder since Vista.

BTW, I'm using a Toshiba 5400RPM 120GB SATA Hard drive, MK1234GSX.

Great to hear some feedback on this issue, thx.

 

I had more hard drive activity under Vista than I do/did under XP. For some reason Vista seems to access the drive more often. I would check with other E1505/6400 users as I have a T60, but it didn't really affect performance, simply cause more hdd activity.

 

yea, it would be good to get more feedback, cos more hdd activity --> shorter life span.

In particular, i wanna make sure that this "fan like" noise is NORMAL hdd activity, not a sign of impending doom for the hdd.

 

What are your RAM specs? Since Vista requires more RAM than XP then its the extra drive activity could be Vista writing data to your page file to keep RAM free.

 

Im running T7200 2.0Ghz, 2GB 667mhz RAM. PLus I'm running ATI Mobility Radeon X1400. I believe my specs shouldn't be a problem.

The noise is like "huuuuuuu....", fan noise type.

 

my drives sound the same with xp or vista the only real thing would be the extra caching vista does but that should just simply sound like the drive is running for a longer period of time not a different sound itself. and if you have indexing turned off it should be okay.

 

Regardless of your specs, if Vista runs the same as XP in terms of page file caching then a higher memory requirement will result in more page file usage, even if you have enough RAM to support everything without a page file. I have a 1gb RAM desktop and a 2gb notebook and if i switched off all the notebook related services a reckon they'd still run similar sized page files. ATM my notebook is running 500mb of page file, my desktop usually 350-400mb. Windows tries to keep as much RAM free as possible, sometimes good, quite often bad. I tried to get around this by switching off my notebook page file but according to task manager it was still paging! Anyone had any experience with this?

 

how loud are your hard drives running under vista? audible all the time? Good if there is some description, even better if you guys out there are using the same laptop with the same toshiba hard drive. Mine is audible all the time, soft, but audible.

Pagefile? hmm....i reckon my ram alone is enough under XP, and I have indexing off at the start.