Hard drive accessing alot

[intoblack136]

It started out with me noticing the small blue light that represents my harddrives activity. It was/is flashing on at a consistent rate of roughly once a second. So lastnight I performed a chkdsk and it turnedup with nothing. So today it seems to be starting a new symptom. You know how busy the hard drive gets upon start up, lots of noise, almost sounds like popcorn popping.

Any how it started doing this out of nowhere, i had no major programs open ( one 1 page of Internet explorer) which had no video or anything like that. I even tried disabling my antivirus for a brief time, but it still happened.

Im starting to fear my drive is on its way out, and its roughly 3 years old, so i doubt i have any warranty left. So my question is before i got plunk down the change to get a new one. Is there any ideas left out there to try?

 

[rolli59]

Have you checked for viruses? Internet = sometimes virus.

 

[Emperus]

Which OS and anti-virus are you using..? Is your drive SATA or PATA..? A constant hard drive led blink is seldom a problem.. But the high noise issue on boot up do indicate a probable failing drive.. Disable unnecessary startup programs and check again..

 

[intoblack136]

Im using windows 7 home 64 bit, my antivirus is avast free home edition.
The drive itself is a wd velociraptor 150 gig

*doing a virus scan now rolli

 

[Rusting In Peace]

There are many reasons why a HDD might make more noise:

- Heavily fragmented
- Significant bad sector remappings
- Application demand

I'd first assess the health of the drive using something like HDTune and look at the SMART values.

Then I'd run some defragmentation utility. The defragger provided by Vista and 7 is ok. I'd just use that in the mean time - there are better tools out there but we don't need it to be perfect.

There are certain background processes that run on windows that can cause additional hard drive activity. Do you have indexing enabled?

Regardless of the scenario it's a good idea to back up your essential files to an external drive / USB key.

 

[intoblack136]

Ok no viruses found, and backed up the things I dare not lose. About to try a defrag, but is indexing necessary id gladly turn it off if not.

And the heavy activity/noise its making is while im sitting on the desktop not during bootup, it just sounds like its booting up or something

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Indexing is only used to increase the speed of search results. Searching will still work without it though.

 

[intoblack136]

Defrag complete, so far so good, but ill update after work. Ty guys for taking the time to lend me a hand.