Failing Hard Drive?

I'm running 2 320g Scorpios in a raid setup, 1 of the drives is making a ticking sound every few min. At that same point the pc freezes for a sec. As if the drive is stoppping then starting. Could it be a power setting or is my HD's life about to come to a abrupt hault?

 

did you install the intel matrix storage manager? if so are there any indications of trouble?

 

More than likely its the hard drive "parking" WD's tend to have a pretty noisey park when the heads/platters stop moving.

I've never heard of a system freezing up because of the before though.

You might want to download HDTune and scan your RAID for bad sectors. If you find any i recommend backing up your data and breaking the array and scanning each HD seperately to see which one is giving you the trouble.

 

I ran HDTune and the Intel Matrix Storage and both say the array is ok. But it never used to tick like this before. Could my RAID controller driver be outdated. idk? But its really annoying. It does it more often while playing WOW.

 

If you dont have any bad sectors then i would just assume your hearing the tell tell sign of western digitals parking brake.

It might be that your hard drives are so well sync'ed that they part together to make it even louder... not sure.

I got so used to mine that i just forgot about it after a while (even when i had my RAID)

The 500gb drives i have now dont seem to make the parking noise at all.

If it really bothers you and you have a ton of money laying around you could always get a SSD and never wory about noise (or preformance) again.

 

Intel Matrix Storage just popped up with a caution icon saying 1 of my drives are about to fail. I deleted the RAID setup and am currently running off my OEM disk. I scanned the disk that i bought thru New Egg and it is 6% damaged, about 22 blocks. Is there a way to fix the damaged blocks? Also when i try to format the disk it says i dont have permission?

 

You can try to recover the bad sectors... but i usually find that a waste of effort.

Its usually a better idea to contact the manufacturer and try to get a replacement (most have 3-5 year warrenties)

As to why you can't format... did you break the Raid apart correctly? I've missed a step before and had to go all the way back through the process before i was able to do anything with the 2 hard drives i had in my Raid Array

 

I thought you said IMS told you the array was fine? Did it randomly give you a popup about the raid about to fail? Just incase I ever come across the problem cause I also have the same setup as you concerning HDs and RAID.... also what stripe were you using... im assuming 64 or 128?

 

I had a pop up from Intel Matrix Storage Manager that said one of my disk in my raid setup was failing. When booting my computer it also said "unknown error" when the storage manager was showing the raid info.

I backed it up and put my factory 160gb and scanned and formatted each of my 320's from my raid and re-setup my raid array and re-imaged and I have not had a problem since.

I don't have a clue why it started failing but redoing it fixed it.

 

I wouldn't expect it to last long. WD HDD's are notorious for producing strange noises before failing. Make sure you make regular backups.