Hard Drive troubles

[yoba333]

So, I recently bought a new Sager laptop with an SSD to run Windows on and a 750 GB HDD for data. Well, for the past week or so the hard drive makes a very loud whirring noise on start-up and occasionally when I go to browse my files or open the recycle bin (but always when my computer starts up). When this started happening, I just backed up my hard drive and let it be, hoping that everything would sort out.

 

However, a while ago I went to empty my Recycle Bin on the desktop. When I opened it, the loud whirring noise started again, and after emptying the bin I tried to close the window (while the noise was still happening). However, every time I clicked the "X" in the top right, the window kept popping back up. This continued until the whirring noise subsided.

 

I'm definitely worried that my hard drive is going to fail now. As far as I can tell, these seem like common symptoms of hard drive failure.... But this is a 4 month old hard drive! It doesn't seem like it would fail this quickly. What could have caused this? I have traveled with the laptop, as it is a laptop and I take it most places I go, but would that cause it?

 

I'd just like to know if it really is failing and what might have caused this issue...

Thanks in advance for your time!

[JohnBond007777]

Hmm.. it might be having write/read issues or is not connected right. It may also have on overheating problem. Try defragmenting, if that doesn't help, take it to Best Buy or Circuit City and get it looked at. Oh, if this is one that did not come with the computer, meaning you bought it separately, problems occasionally occur with parts like this.

[Vagrant0]

Hmm.. it might be having write/read issues or is not connected right. It may also have on overheating problem. Try defragmenting, if that doesn't help, take it to Best Buy or Circuit City and get it looked at. Oh, if this is one that did not come with the computer, meaning you bought it separately, problems occasionally occur with parts like this.

Pretty much this. Faulty hardware does happen on occasion.

 

Just make sure you don't do something silly like start diverting temp files and the like to the SSD as this will lead to other problems and shorten the life of your drive as SSD drives still have trouble managing rewriting to sectors before that sector goes bad.

[prandiningrat]

I use CrsytalDiskInfo for monitoring hard drives, it will detect if hdd is going to bad, or has bad sectors...bad sector on hdd can occur any time no matter the hdd is new or not..if you are too often forcing OS to reboot/powered off without shutdown feature, this will cause a bad sectors on disk(can be fixed by formatting it or delete the partition and create new partition)...also shock is one of the most common that causing hdd to fails and even permananet bad sector, this is no way to repairing it...

[HeyYou]

If it is still under warranty, back up your files, and have the drive replaced.

[yoba333]

It's still under warranty, so that's not a problem. It did come with the computer, too. Thanks for the responses, I'll try to defragment it and check out a few other things before I send it off to get replaced though.

[DarkWarrior45]

Whatever you do, do not defragment your SSD, as it will do you no good (SSDs don't suffer from fragmentation) and defragmentation actually takes away from the life of the drive (because of the large amount of accesses).

 

The symptoms you've described sounds like the 750GB is having issues. Yes, I've seen brand new hard drives be bad out of the box. I've also seen hard drives fail the day after getting a new computer. This is the nature of the beast; sometimes hard drive manufacturers do not carefully watch the environment the hard drive is being made in. This is important because if the humidity in their factory floor is slightly off, it can cause reliability problems with the drive (such as the drive suddenly dying). This is also one of the reasons why hard drives can only be opened inside a clean room.

 

A mechanical hard drive, such as your 750 GB, can also fail from what's called a head crash. This is very common in laptops. A head crash is where the read/write head of the hard drive has physically contacted the platter, and a whirling noise and slow access times are symptoms of this. Head crashes are caused when the laptop is dropped, carried in a bag or backpack while in sleep mode (drives don't always park their read/write heads when in sleep mode), or from any kind of sudden shock to the system.

 

Hope this helps.

[yoba333]

Whatever you do, do not defragment your SSD, as it will do you no good (SSDs don't suffer from fragmentation) and defragmentation actually takes away from the life of the drive (because of the large amount of accesses).

 

The symptoms you've described sounds like the 750GB is having issues. Yes, I've seen brand new hard drives be bad out of the box. I've also seen hard drives fail the day after getting a new computer. This is the nature of the beast; sometimes hard drive manufacturers do not carefully watch the environment the hard drive is being made in. This is important because if the humidity in their factory floor is slightly off, it can cause reliability problems with the drive (such as the drive suddenly dying). This is also one of the reasons why hard drives can only be opened inside a clean room.

 

A mechanical hard drive, such as your 750 GB, can also fail from what's called a head crash. This is very common in laptops. A head crash is where the read/write head of the hard drive has physically contacted the platter, and a whirling noise and slow access times are symptoms of this. Head crashes are caused when the laptop is dropped, carried in a bag or backpack while in sleep mode (drives don't always park their read/write heads when in sleep mode), or from any kind of sudden shock to the system.

 

Hope this helps.

 

That does help... I think it may actually be that head crash, because one time I forgot to turn my laptop completely off when I drove it somewhere..