Time to replace hard drive?

Well i got a year and a half old dell m1530 with a 250GB 7200 rpm hard drive. Anyway, I have noticed lately it constantly read/writes at idle, as by looking at the speratic activity in the resource monitor, and a can hear it constantly grinding away. I would blame this on my current O/S, windows 7, but it didnt do this when i first installled it.

So, my question is, does this mean i should buy a new hard drive?

Thanks for any input.

 

did you try to do a clean install of the OS? maybe you just have a process that's hogging up resources, keeps writing/reading, etc...?

if you are hearing grinding/motor/scratchy sounds, then it's a hardware issue. if it's constant reads and writes, it could be software related. also, have you defragged lately? also check for errors on the disk via defrag/scandisk.

 

yes a clean install, with only the regular windows processes and norton running in the background.

 

if u said it started with win 7, try putting xp on there just to see if you get the same, continuous disk activity.

if you are 99.9% sure it's the drive, get a new one.

 

well i got xp on another partition, so ill run that for a while and see what happens. Thanks alot.

 

Simple drive activity doesn't mean anything - it might be just indexing the drive - let that finish.

You can check your SAMRT data using CrystalDiskInfo - http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Also:
Keep an external backup of your data, it is highly recommended.

 

^ cosign. i have an external 750gb drive and two other 320gb drives for backups. I keep my really important stuff (family pictures) in 3 locations: on my machine, on another laptop i have and on an external drive.

it's not paranoia, it's preparedness.

 

Welll ur Norton might be causing the lagg tooo... use a light program like Avast or Microsoft security essentials instead as ur anit-virus... also defrag your hard drive and if u can do a clean install of windows.... u don't really need to replace a 1 year old drive unless u get problems...

 

Oh, time means nothing - I had 1 SMART warning on my old laptop after 1 year, and a freak drive failure on a new drive after 1 year - if you use your laptop a lot on the go, bump into things it can easily break in one year.

If its mostly stationary, then it shouldn't break soon.

 

Norton?

I worked on an XP Pro, P4 3GHz (not dual core) computer a while back that was taking almost 10 minutes to boot and be usable. By usable, I mean load the network and have internet access.

Uninstalling Norton and replacing it with MSE made the bootup improve to the 4 minute range.

Running PD twice offline and three times online made the computer 'normal' with a boot to usable state in less than 2 minutes.

Kill Norton, get MSE, use PD if you want an even more optimized storage subsystem.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=441764


Oh! One more thing; disable System Restore too (to decrease/eliminate excess HD activity). System Restore + Norton = Disaster.

 

Norton is a highly rated premium product. Mine runs so cleanly and quietly in the background I never even notice it's there.

Incidentally, I got rid of Norton for a month (due to it's price) then re-installed it and never noticed a change.

 

Many security products cause a lot of disk activity. Certainly Norton and MacAfee.

But, there is no need to reinstall an OS to find out.

Just start in safe mode and let it idle.

If the disk activity is not present in safe mode, then the disk activity in normal mode is being initiated by a software process. At that point, you have to start hunting down the offending process.

 

Norton is not highly rated by anyone who needs their computer to perform at a high level.

No need to 'check' which processes they are if Norton or MacAfee is installed - just remove them (use their 'remove completely' special uninstaller you can download from the respective websites, and get your computer back.

Krane, not sure why you wouldn't notice it uninstalling and then reinstalling a month later - but maybe its because it wasn't completely uninstalled? Even if its 'expired' it is still making the computer crawl. BTW, did it drop in price so much in one month that it was worth to purchase again? Just curious.

 

Agreed. Just didn't want to push that partcular point.

 

Mc afee did cause a lot of disk activity and used too much RAM so that why i moved to Microsoft security essentials and then moved avast now, which is better...