Hard drive dieing?

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Mr_Threepwood

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Hi, ive had my computer for about a year and a half now, its been used heavily. Recently my hard drive has increased from silent, to notably noisy whenever it is accessed. I have 2 30 gb raptor drives in there and was considering reformatting and putting them on RAID 0. Now I'm not so sure, because if one dies and its in RAID 0 then all my data is lost. Anyone offer advice as to wether my hard drive is dieng or not, ans what i should do regarding RAID?
 
Forget the raid. Is that a 10k rpm raptor? I would stongly suggest your back up your critical data and buy another drive asap. It is not going to show any errors and will fail because of a failing drive arm spin bushing which you can't fix. I hate it when that happens!!!
 
It's really that bad you think? Yes they are the 10k rpm raptors. Maybe I've told you the wrong things, its not like its a horribly loud noise, just sometimes it makes a light noise whereas before I didnt notice anything at all. Does this still mean they are going to die out on me pretty soon? So far aside from the noise Ive had no read errors or anything, Im gonna reformat windows soon and I guess I wont put them on RAID mode but I was still hoping for them to hold windows. I have a new 250 gb hard drive but its not quit as fast, 7200 rpm. So I was hoping to load the OS onto the fast raptors while leaving that one for storage. Is it at the point where I should go the other way though? IE install windows on the 250 GB one while using the others as storage?
 
those are western digital sata drives ? are they both making the same noise ? I would not worry about it, you are probably just hearing the drive access, which may seem louder then before because now you have more data and it may be fragmented, so the drive read write head has to do some skooting around.
If your primary HD is making the noise, if you can put all your data from the secondary on the primary , then ghost the primary to the secondary drive so the suspect drive is the secondary now. I like western digital HDs, we use them here at work. If you do not want to buy another sata drive and you have a PATA drive laying around..go to ebay and get a SATA to PATA adapter. That is a sata mainboard to pata HD, make sure you do not get the reverse, they are usually under $15 ship included.
 
Have you also tried the tools from Western digital to test your HD to make sure there is nothing wrong with it, you can usually DL them from their web site. Is the noise when there is disk access or just when they are freely spinning ?
 
K I'm pretty sure its both making the noise, hard to tell. Ill try the tools, might as well. Still would you say doing RAID 0 is a bad idea? As for fragmentatin, yes my drives are heavily fragmented, to the point where I can no longer defragment them. Im reinstalling windows this weekend so I wanted to know what people suggested I do regarding thd drives, and wether or not I should try RAID 0.
 
Dude..thats why they are making noise, they have to shoot back and forth getting your data. You can not run the defrag in windows...I would definately DL the tool and check to make sure you do not have bad sectors. After you get all your data off I would run the destructive test that will actually write to the HD, I think it may run for awhile. If they are both making the same noise, I would not worry unless you have cooked both the HDs, how warm does it get inside your pc...there is a free tool called HD THERMOMETER Here is a link to DL a copy, it will run in your icon tray and tell you how hot your HDs are

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/HDD_Thermometer/1112635863/1

make sure you get the whole URL

heat will ruin a hd faster then anything.
 
As far as raid 0 , i think that is the raid that makes stripe sets. that will not protect your data. You want the rais that will make mirror sets. I just checked raid 0 just makes strpe sets, no data redundentcy, if you lose one HD you will not be able to pull data off of the second good HD. You want mirror sets.
 
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