Damaging HDD?

[OsirisMedia01]

G'day

I brought a new western digital 7200rpm 80Gig HDD cpl months back
anyway every now and again I notice it makes a "Siiight" kind of noise, like a CD or DVD does when the drive first starts to read it, whenever I access the drive, eg move a scroll bar in a large folder, and I hear it.

Anyway I thought it was comming from the CD/DVD Drive, but It did it before and I realised I had no CD/DVD in ANY of the drives.

Now its not a loud noise, just a very faint, just hearable noise, thjis is with the case on that is.

Anyway lately since I brought it ive been doing alot of encoding. and copying back and fourht of large files quite alot actually, with ripping to divx and now burning DVD backups, etc so were talking some serious creating and copying and deleting of over 1gig files. COuld this be damaging the drive any?

Should I be concerned about this, as it isnt always doing it, and I dont appear to be suffereing any performace loss etc from the drive, encoding, playing games etc, all seem to work as good as ever.

What do you think?

[ohliuv]

dont think that copying back and forth of huge files can cause problems. I've been using a 20gig fujutsu like that for, I think, 3 years. It's still OK

[auenf]

@OsirisMedia01

i think your drive might be powering off, and is powering back up each time you use it, which you can disable in power control panel

Enf...

[phamilton]

It could be that the drive has a large cache (e.g. tens of Mbytes) allowing it to spin down until the cache is almost full/empty (depending on the direction of the transfer) in which case you are hearing it start up again.

[OsirisMedia01]

Thansk guys
Id say thats the most likely cause to be honest
it does sound like a winding up / down type sound in the drive.

[theReal]

Also check the power connectors to the drive. They often lose contact and drive your HD's up and down in a very unhealthy way...

[Xayd]

Considering the abnormally strenuous usage that we're putting on these IDE drives, mainly with the constant copying of 1 gig and bigger files, they're just not gonna last as long as a hard drive would last the "average" user.

Some brands tend to be more rugged than others. From my experiences Maxtors don't hold up that well under heavy use over a period of months, Seagates do, Fujitsus do, IBMs absolutely do not (for IDE only, SCSI from IBM is ok), Quantum was arguably worse than IBM, Western Digital depends on the model. My current 80 gig 8 meg cache one is holding up ok after a few months, but I've had older 2 meg cache WDs (mainly in the 20 to 30 gig range) that failed very quickly.

For longevity, personally I've seen the best from Seagate and Fujitsu, both for IDE and SCSI. Seagates due to their liquid suspended bearings are also very cool and quiet, if that's a concern (Fujitsus are honestly the opposite, very loud and hot especially the SCSIs, but they hold up under use ;)).

[ohliuv]

Originally posted by Xayd
Seagates due to their liquid suspended bearings are also very cool and quiet, if that's a concern (Fujitsus are honestly the opposite, very loud and hot especially the SCSIs, but they hold up under use ;)).

Hmm, just the opposite experience 2 years ago with seagate and fujitsu ... maybe things changed ...