[Solved] Seagate 7200.11 1TB going to the dogs?

Hello, I have a seagate 7200.11 1TB drive that I currently use as a storage drive for all my media, and as such, it is only used when I'm watching movies or installing something.

Recently (~2 months ago), when I accessed the drive after a longish time of no use (say first boot up or 30 minutes of no use) it makes a really loud spinning noise, then followed what sounds like the arm hitting the side rapidly (whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl....click.click.click.click), this causes the read/write to delay about ~5 seconds max and then it would continue on as normal, this won't happen if I'm continuously using the drive.

I'm using windows 7 with AHCI enabled, and was wondering if this is a new "sleep" feature for power saving (yeahhhhh that 1000w power supply is green alright) and the damned thing is coming out of sleep or something, so was wondering if there is a place to set it, or else if this sounds like a dying HDD.

BTW speed fan reports SMART is NOT tripped, I know it can be useless, but when the thing works fine and don't have any issue accessing data otherwise. Are there any HDisk testing software that will actively test the drive instead of reading SMART data?

yeah WD black 1TB here i come... and these are just some easily replaced stuff so yeah

blah, it seems that i dont have much luck with seagate lately, before they were really nice, but a .10 320 GB failed and had to RMA, and now this .11 is failing

Yeah, not only were the .11 drives themselves bad, but their firmware was bad as well. Check out this HDD in addition to the WD
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822152185