Is my hard drive dying?

Okay so this problem started a while ago in december but now its starting to become more and more frequent.

Basically after i upgraded to windows 7 around the holidays last year, every time i would boot up my computer from sleep, it would be super laggy and slow. My hard drive light would be on and i would hear some short whirs coming from my hard drive. You know how hard drives sound when they load programs or when you start up windows, the constant whirring/grinding sound. Basically mine would just sound like that but in really short intervals, kinda like it going tick tick tick tick over and over.

Now it has started happening again and not only when i boot up from hibernate or even a fresh restart. When im randomly surfing or even leaving the laptop idle it would just start doing that. The hard drive light would be on showing activity and i would hear short ticks coming from the hard drive. It stops after a while but starts up randomly.

Could it be a program or windows causing this?

Should i start shopping for a new HD?
Also would any 2.5" HD work in any laptop?

Edit: Also active hard drive monitor shows my HD temps in my mid 40's. Is that bad?

 

it might be a problem... i think it would be safe to try getting a new HDD... ur problem does sound like a dying drive. Also any 2.5 inch 9.5mm drive will work.. The best one is Hitachi 7K500 500GB drive... also temps in 40s is allright if ur computer is on load and writing a lot.. if ure doing nothing and idle temps are 40s , it quite hot.

 

its 40s when idle and now its 55 while i was trying to fragment. Wow

 

Try running HDD Regenerator.

 

I've had that happen to a couple of hard drives before and I decided to play it safe and get a new one. I think its better than thinking your hard drive could die at any time, plus those noises can get annoying

 

Another thing i noticed is that my hard drive does this whenever it has to go through alot of activity, not like loading up files or whatever but when its being defragmented or booting up windows. Everything will lock up and i would just hear some ticking.

 

Had this happen to one of mine - general slowing down, sporadic noises, slow loading of the OS and programs, warmer than normal to the touch (hard drive area on the laptop).
Back-up your important data/files soon - you're hard drive is in the process of failing. Waiting will simply result in one day nothing will happen when attempt to use it.

 

I just had the same symptoms you are describing. Just lost one of my HDD's in my raid 5 laptop. Definitely time to replace dude, or you'll boot it up one day to find the black screen of death with a little note at the top of your screen saying "no Operating System detected..."

So best to back up now if you haven't, because it will strike/fail when you least expect it. Safe to assume any day now it will fail.

 

Everyone is saying the same thing :

Get a new HDD and meanwhile try to
1) Copy your most vital files off onto an external HDD using windows copy/paste
2) If the Laptop is still funtional do a full disk image onto an external USB HDD !!!

 

Already backed up everything and gonna be getting a new HD tomorrow while waiting for the inevitable

 

Consider yourself lucky. Most times hard drives just crash out of nowhere and without warning signs.

 

Why don't you check for smart errors and if passes, re-image the drive? Just to rule out any system errors. Hot running drives can certainly be caused by type of notebook and environment. Mine regularly hit 40+C.

 

SMART doesn't always report an error early. I've seen plenty of HD's go bad while SMART is still reporting the drive as good.

 

Well it would be good to do it to rule out it being a software issue which could mean that the drive actually isn't dying. It wouldn't hurt if you are planning to replace the drive anyway.

 

..and what plenty of errors did smart miss?

 

Please read :

After our initial attempts to derive such models
yielded relatively unimpressive results, we turned to the
question of what might be the upper bound of the accuracy
of any model based solely on SMART parameters.
Our results are surprising, if not somewhat disappointing.
Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no
count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely
scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and
probational count. In other words, models based only
on those signals can never predict more than half of the
failed drives. Figure 14 shows that even when we add
all remaining SMART parameters (except temperature)
we still find that over 36% of all failed drives had zero
counts on all variables.

From :
http://static.googleusercontent.com.../labs.google.com/en//papers/disk_failures.pdf

 

Thanks, that was dated 2007. So in three years, nothing has improved even in long testing?

Please don't think that everyone is so naive to think that smart caches all. It was certainly not smart enough to see the cat coming before drive hit the floor

Has the OP had a chance to check?

 

so...how do i do all this exactly??
im noob

 

First step is to back up any files you can't loose if drive will still boot.

Might as well right click on my computer then right click on your drive. Now click on "properties" then "tools". There is a utility called "check disk"; run this..it may take a while. It's free and you have nothing to loose.

You can also download, free, HDtune from here; HD Tune website.

When installed, click on the SMART ERROR tab and look for any yellow warning signs. As pointed out, several times, it may not see all errors but I have replaced drives with shown errors.

Check back and let us know what you find. Several members here are far more up on drive problems that I am.

 

I have 3 yellow warning signs. I already ran chkdsk a few days ago which didnt solve anything but anyway this is what it says.

Reallocated sector count - warning
Reallocated event count - warning
Current pending sector - warning

Health status - warning

 

Well, this looks like it's time to shop newegg and amazon for a new drive. $75 will let you choose several bare 500M drives or $40 will get you a few 250M drives.

 

Chkdsk will have NO affect on the SMART status.

Now do yourself a huge favor and go to the hard drive manufacturer's support site, download the self booting hard drive diagnostic program ISO image, create the self booting cd, then boot to it and run the most exhaustive diagnostic it has available.

 

Lol, Toshiba has to be the only company without a HD utility.
Either way i got my new WD scorpio black and have everything up and running now. Will be testing for stability.

 

Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test will check Toshiba drives, as long as you don't have the ICH9M chipset.

 

Not to confuse you:

If SMART reports those sorts of errors the drive is strugging with serious problems and using up its 'hidden supply' of spare sectors to patch up sectors (bits of the main disk area) the drive believes to be faulty (usually it had trouble finding/reading them)

Drives can fail without these warnings (the side discussion about the Google disk study), but a drive showing these specific warnings should be considered 'about to fail at any moment' . Replace ASAP.

You can run disk tools, you can run 'deep' utilities to tell the drive to forget the errors it has seen. But for the cost of a HDD vs the trouble of lost files etc I would just replace it, destroy it (for information security) and move on

 

The SMART standard has changed barely at all, and the last few years have done little to convince anyone that HDD reliability is improving either.

SMART is capable of recognising and warning about some types of slow evolving faults and (as in the case of the OP's disk) if sectors are being quietly reallocated from the (finite supply of) backups SMART may be able to sound a warning before any data loss occurs. So respect for that.

However heads breaking off, drive electronics failure, bearing cracks, firmware bugs etc happen too fast for any warning. The google survey monitored disks in near ideal conditions . . and effectively says a SMART warning should not be ignored . . but no Smart warning is not a guarantee of health.

The most interesting thing about that survey is that all the HDD manufacturers involved allegedly gagged the researchers from revealing failure rates by Brand.. . .

 

The lack of drive failure info has been discussed to death during the last 5 years in these forums. Nothing new there

Another favorite question is "which brand is best"..watch the fur fly.

The suggestion to use SMART to the OP was just that.

 

Ok guys, now theres a problem with my new hard drive.
Well not really a problem, more of an annoyance.

Basically ever since i installed it yesterday, my laptop would make like high pitched squeak or screech for a second, kind of like someone dragging their nails on a chalkboard only for a second.

Wasn't the problem with my old hard drive. HDTune shows everything is normal. What can i do/is the problem?

 

Go to the Western Digital Support Site and download their self booting diagnostic program ISO, create the cd, boot to it, then run the thorough test. It's a LOT more comprehensive than HDTune, and a lot more useful in this type of situation. HDTune is okay for quick SMART readout, but that's about the extent of it's capabilities when it comes to diagnostics.

 

Is this a constant noise every 1 second? Not normal, call and ask for a replacement. None of my wds have made a screech? Is this just at power up or constant?

 

its constant, not every second but just randomly. The screech or sound or whatever you want to call it lasts from half a second to a second. Just like a tiny "screech" every now and then. Its not very loud but super annoying. I'm not 100% its the hard drive but pretty positive it is as it started ever since i installed it. The operating time on this HD is not even 72 hours yet and theres already a problem, lol.

Could be because this was an open box item though from the retailer i bought it, was 20% of so i figured may as well as they said they had tested it for functionality and the warranty/replacement is still intact.

 

Now your scaring me..return it and save for better. Use your old drive till it dies..

 

Just ran a quick test on WD's diagnostic, it passed. Will do a full test later and see how it goes.

I'm starting to think its not the hard drive but my AC making the noise. I put my ear next to where the power cord is plugged in and it seems to be coming from there. I'm not sure why this just started happening :S