Need to discover which hard drive is making noise (intermittently)

[smalltownusa]

Hi all:
Have an HTPC with 4 hard drives (2-2TB, 2-1TB). One of these drives is now making intermittent noise. I am afraid it is on the way to crashing. When I open up the case it does not make any noise (of course!) First thought the noise was a fan, but am now pretty certain it is one of the drives.
Question: Is there someway I can track down which drive it is (other than getting it to make noise when I have the case open)? Any hardware test I can run?
Thanks for the help,
Harold

 

[jsrudd]

You could check the SMART status of the drives.

One more idea is to make a note of what file you were watching or what file was being written when you hear the noise. Normally drives will turn off after 30 minutes of non-use (this is the Windows default) so you will know that most likely on the OS drive and the drive on which the file you're working with is located are spinning. With enough data you can probably narrow it down to a specific drive. Of course if the drives are in RAID then this will not work.

 

[smalltownusa]

Thanks for the reply. Finally tracked down the problem. It was one of case fans, not the hard drive.
Harold

 

[smalltownusa]

Best answer selected by smalltownusa.