HDD grinds when idle?

[Omaeka]

In all honesty, almost every PC I've owned has done this from the day I've had them, but I'm not sure if this is normal? I've read online about numerous people worried, but never seen a fix or a reason, is it standard for Windows PC's to do this? I'm quite worried after reading them to be quite honest, the HDD is an important thing I'm sure you'd agree

My HDD is an Hitachi HD S721010CLA332 ATA 1 Terabyte, thats all I know

Thanks!

-DefJamV

 

[celliott]

If by grinds you means seeking/working then its normal. Windows has lots of things going on in the background e.g. Windows search indexing

If its a new install especially, it should settle down after a few days or so

The grinding sound you hear is just the drive head moving around very quickly over the platters inside the drive, nothing is actually grinding!

 

[Omaeka]

Thank god but it just stays quiet for about 10 minutes after I leave it and then it starts making a lot of noise, it does it very often, because Virgin Media (terrible ISP tbh) caps our connection for no reason my upload speeds are horrible, and I leave my PC on overnight to upload to YouTube (with a window open, to keep the room freezing ) yet I find it hard to sleep because it just goes nuts, I can't imagine what its doing, right now I'm uploading, have a game minimized and two videos rendering in VirtualDub and the HDD isn't going anywhere near as crazy as when its idle, and its even writing new video files to my HDD, same when I record with Dxtory, barely any HDD activity even though its writing 50GB + files over the space of 30 odd minutes. It's just really odd and I'm not sure if that level of inactive activity is normal? :/

 

[Kotu]

It will defrag when idle as well, if your drive is nearly full then it takes much longer for it to finish.