Hard drive rev high periodically

Overheating is purported to be a common cause of drive failure..
Nowadays, a number of advanced technologies are available worldwide for data recovery purposes.

^
|

Spammer - ignore the idi0t...

1. How do you know its your hard drive - really?

Is this a desktop or laptop? Laptops will slow down the hard drive to save power. There is usually a setting in the bios to optimize for power or for performance. Performance just sets the drive to its speed all the time.

Desktop - typically the hard rives run at their posted rpm no matter what.

Many systems will spend a fair amount of time indexing your files for better search speed - you may hear your drive working to do that - but it should go away after awhile.

While I will opine that Norton is crap, you could try running malwarebytes to search for a virus. If that passes then it is just the sound your system is making.

I suppose it could be the drive beginning to go bad?