Potential HDD issue? Not sure if I need to worry

[fitzeyy]

Hello,

I've been having a grinding noise originating from my PC case for a while now, occurring mostly whenever I do something that's even mildly intensive. I always suspected it's the HDD but I didn't stress over it too much as it didn't actually affect my performance. However, recently I started noticing that a few of my games don't run smoothly, they start stuttering/freezing up for a good 1-2 seconds on random times, there's no pattern involved, for ex. my game will run for smooth for 5-20 seconds and then freeze up/stutter a bit, then proceed normally and so on and so on.

My question to you, is my HDD dying/causing performance loss or it's something else I should worry about?

I couldn't find how to attach an audio file, so here's a link of the recording I made: Noise

 

[Mr5oh]

Sounds like normal hard drive noise to me? Usually performance drives are louder than standard drives, but they all make some noise while operating.

If there is any doubt you should check the SMART data for the hard drive in question.

 

[fitzeyy]

Sounds like normal hard drive noise to me? Usually performance drives are louder than standard drives, but they all make some noise while operating.

If there is any doubt you should check the SMART data for the hard drive in question.

I guess you're right, although the recording isn't completely clear, my case is below me and i can hear it pretty clear from up here. This leaves me wondering though, what's causing the random stutters/freezes in some games?

 

[Mr5oh]

If you think that's loud, here is an old MP3 I still have on my webserver, raptortest2.mp3. That's one of the original WD Raptor drives during a benchmark. That drive has been in use since I bought it new, currently running in my father-in-laws machine as a Linux drive. Still running strong after more than 10 years.

The SMART data would verify if the drive is healthy or not. As for the stutters/freezes, there's no shortage of things that can cause that. Best advice I have there is try running benchmarks on individual items, and see if anything is performing abnormally slow. However I would suspect something running in the background being the more likely cause.

 

[ssddx]

you may want to run a scan to test your hard drive for potential problems http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/tophddiag.htm

seagate seatools is always a good choice. while not a 100% yes/no answer it can certainly help diagnose if theres an issue.

you might also want to run chkdsk to see if there are file errors on your drive http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2641432 as if there is a large number there could be an issue.

regardless i'd say make sure you have files backed up (as you should always have files backed up in 2 places in case of problems).

as far as the noise is concerned... it may or may not be normal though i've never had a drive (even wd blacks) which made such a noise. i would suggest reading http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1924690/hard-drive-grinding-noise.html and listening to the file fellow mod nukemaster provided. the sound is very similar.

 

[fzabkar]

IMHO, the best tool for scanning your drive is MHDD. It runs under DOS, so the results are not skewed by interference from background tasks as is the case with Windows based tools. MHDD will identify any "slow" sectors, ie those that require one or more retries. Most other tools (except HDDScan) are pass-or-fail diagnostics and would not be very useful in identifying lags in performance.