Hard Drive Defrag

[BillBrad]

I have three hard drives in my computer. A brand new 120 gig hooked into the mother board. I bought a IDE PCI card from maxtor and hooked two harddrives into that. All drives are acessable and seem to be working perfectly. Whenever I defrag with the program diskkeeper Lite it runs perfectly on my 120 gig drive on the mother board without hardly any noise.. Whenever I defrag a HD off the IDE card I get a weird clicking noise one time persecond. And it also sounds like the power supply on the computer is clicking on and off but it really isn't. The drive is doing what it is suppose to do and that is defrag. But just wondering why this noise occurs. Whenever I read from the drive normally it dosn't make these sounds. And the 120 gig HD is 7200rpm while the other two drives of the IDE card are 5400rpm. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[BillBrad]

It isn't a sound like the drive is working. It is more like the sound your computer makes when shutting down right before it powers down by itself. It is kind of loud like when you read from a 3.5" floppy disk. Very annoying sound.

 

[BillBrad]

Yeah, it almost seems like the IDE Card is slowing up the defrag process and taking longer to complete because of this clicking on and off.. I tried turning off my screensaver and my monitor shutoff timer and that didn't do the trick.

 

[Blueman]

What kind of drives are the 5400 rpm's? are they older drives?

if so they may on the way out. I'd go to the manufacturer's web site and download thier diagnostic tools to check em out!

Western Digitals make a sound like that when they are going bad. kind of a CLick! whhhrrrrrrr... so check it before you're sorry!

 

[BillBrad]

I'll try both of those suggestions now

 

[ebullock]

You also might try
1. Use the defragger which comes with Windows (2K and XP) to see if the drive still makes the same sound. This would isolate the problem to DiskKeeper Lite behavior, not the disk going bad.
2. I also think the suggestion (made above) to run the disk manufacturer's diagnostic utility an extremely good one.
3. Less likely to help, but should be checked: Are the BIOS, Windows, and the drive itself all on the same "wavelength" as to the access method (PIO, UDMA2, UDMA5, or whatever?). Are the 2 drives confgured "master/slave" or "cable select"? Is ribbon cable certified for access method (40 vs 80-wire cable)? Just some thoughts ....

 

[ekÆsine]

or possibly you have too many devices and the power supply is being overloading, just a suggestion.

try disconnect all devices including cd-roms and test only 1 hard disk at a time on the PCI ide card. if they work fine one by themselves than probably the power supply is overloaded.

 

[Trevorg8]

just wondering but why use a second hand software to defrag your HDD, Isnt the wondows defrag just as good if not better?