Hitachi 1tb drive making hamster noise and freezing for a few seconds.

[gabb]

Hi guys...

I bought a Hitachi 1TB drive a few months ago.

first couple of weeks, SMART showed 8 sectores reallocated.
I read up on this and it seems that reallocating some sectors during the first few days is normal, but anyways, that number didn't go up anymore for about 5-6 months now.


About the noise:
I don't know when it exactly started but I hear it once ever 4-5 hours when the Hd is under heavy usage.

It's like a hamster noise, a tiny squeak and Windows freezes up for a second.

I'm not sure if this is a drive problem, or something to do with my setup.

I have a 500gb maxtor connected to SATA1, but in BIOS I overrid the RAId controllers, and set it up as "IDE compatible"
Hitachi drive is on SATA2 and same thing.

Maybe it's a driver problem, or maybe the drive is failing.

Problem is that I run Hitachi's diagnostics CD and it says that the drive is fine, so I'm not sure about getting an RMA on this thing.

What do you guys think I should do?


Thanks.

 

[edijs]

Maybe you should run a couple 3rd party drive testing utilities like the ones found on Hirens Boot CD. If you say that the noise and freezeups emerge only when the drive is under load, then you should concentrate on stress testing. I had some annoying noises from my hdd too, but that was due to insufficient fixing within the computer case and the vibration was causing the noise...

 

[gabb]

Maybe you should run a couple 3rd party drive testing utilities like the ones found on Hirens Boot CD. If you say that the noise and freezeups emerge only when the drive is under load, then you should concentrate on stress testing. I had some annoying noises from my hdd too, but that was due to insufficient fixing within the computer case and the vibration was causing the noise...

I tried Hitachi's DFT extended test which took about 4 hours to complete and it says it's fine.
I also enabled accoustics management on it. Not sure if this has something to do with it or not (it was disabled before).

I'll do some hdtach tests today.

 

[edijs]

I guess that the accoustics mgmt is something like this. Did you try to change any settings, cause apparently simply enabling it won't do any good. But before that you should disable it though, so you can be sure that the drive is operating w/o any alterations.