Hard Drive Thrashing?

Rezident

Rezident

Rezident

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2007
Posts
4,924
Location
Dublin
My trusty WD Raptor 150Gb drive has been working practically silently in my P182 case for the last 18 months or so. Recently it became very noisy and started thrashing wildly so I thought it was dying and backed everything up.

A few weeks later it's still working perfectly in games etc. so I'm thinking maybe it's not dying. But what else could be causing the sudden thrashing? It's not just in games, but even in Windows at the desktop.

It's not full either, there's still about 50Gb free space. Any ideas?

Cheers.
 
Might be badly fragmented, or it might be Windows indexing the contents (TBH that doesn't usually result in 'thrashing' type noises). I would clean out any temp files, temporarily remove the pagefile (or reduce it to something tiny) then defragment the whole disk including an off-line defragmentation of the system files.
 
It's not indexing because turning off indexing was one of the first things I did after installing Windows as it's useless to me (and most users). I also regularly defrag after CCleaner using JkDefragGUI which is better than Window's defrag tool.

It could be something to do with the Pagefile alright, I'll check that out - thanks for that.
 
Fairly sure I remember reading a long time ago SMART isn't....well smart :P

Not sure but WD probably have some tools for checking the HD.
 
If it fails the SMART tests chances are it's borked. Worst case you will find out how many remapped sectors there are. No reason not to run a smart test.
 
Sorry, what exactly is a SMART test? (Google provides very many very inteesesting yet PC-unrelated results :D).

I did run a normal disk check or whatever it's called from Windows - Windows said it couldn't do the check while the drive was in use (it's my C: drive) so it scheduled it to run at next boot, it ran at the reboot and said the drive was fine.

My case has some noise-dampening but the thrashing is still very loud now. The drive has been practically silent for 18 months or so :confused: What else would cause insane thrashing?
 
The issue is to differentiate between the drive simply working hard and abnormal (seek) noises. Make it do something like the chkdsk, or defrag, or copy a bunch of small files (do it in Safe Mode so there aren't too many background tasks going on) - if it still makes loud seek noises it may be faulty. Look at the SMART report in HD Tune to see if there's anything abnormal. The problem with Raptors is that they are intrinsically noisy. My old 74GB Raptor is now the boot drive in my 2nd PC and it sometimes sounds much louder than the Velociraptor in my main rig. If the Velociraptor made that racket I'd be RMAing it. However it doesn't do it all the time, and it doesn't do it during normal task - it just occasionally starts to rattle doing some unknown Windows stuff. It still works OK, and SMART doesn't report any problems. If yours does it ALL the time then you're right to suspect it.
 
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