[SOLVED] Toshiba HDD making weird, heavy grinding noises

[chiken_VEVO]

Hey everyone! So, basically in the system that I build myself a couple of months ago I have 2 Toshiba DT01ACA200 2TB HDDs. One of which I bought 4 years ago and which is doing just fine even now and a second one, which I bought a few months ago with the rest of my PC's components.

Now, this may sound stupid and I hope I haven't caused a lot of damage, but from pretty much the beginning of operation of my new PC in December, my new HDD has been doing some weird, really heavy and deep grinding noises. Now, I personally am a person who probably does multiple Terrabytes of file transfers each and every year and even though I don't operate my PC every day, when I do, I really put a lot of pressure into those drives. This is why I hope the above noise is due to the HDD automatically defragmenting (even though my first HDD has never made such a noise before). Despite that though, I have now turned off my PC and looking for a fix, as since about 2 months ago, my PC's screen has been freezing every approximately 3 hours of operation for about one second and then it's operation continues perfectly.

Despite the above problems, this HDD has been overperforming for me to be honest. It's extremely fast for an HDD and it really serves me well. I hope anyone here could provide feedback on how to fix the problem, so that I can start doing back - ups of the 1 Terrabyte of data that I have transferred to the HDD since the day I bought it 4 months ago :/

Thanks in advance.

 

[Newtonius]

Install crystaldiskmark and crystaldisk info to both monitor and test the drive. It sounds like the write head / lubricant is starting to wear which could result in the death of the drive. As for the freezing, perform a crsytal disk mark test, check if the 4k random read and writes are okay. And lastly for the defragging, search up 'defrag' on windows search and check what the schedule frequency is, drives don't defrag by themselves unless scheduled by windows.

 

[chiken_VEVO]

Install crystaldiskmark and crystaldisk info to both monitor and test the drive. It sounds like the write head / lubricant is starting to wear which could result in the death of the drive. As for the freezing, perform a crsytal disk mark test, check if the 4k random read and writes are okay. And lastly for the defragging, search up 'defrag' on windows search and check what the schedule frequency is, drives don't defrag by themselves unless scheduled by windows.

Thabk you a lot for your help! I'll follow what you said closely and run all the tests.

Meanwhile, I think I've overreacted a bit concerning the noise and I apologize for that. It still doesn't make the same noise and the old HDD of the same model, but after I watched a few videos with how healthy HDDs sound like on high loads, I have to say that it sounds the exact same... Seems like the CD drive on my Old Xbox 360 when it was on high load.

The only thing that troubles me now are those random freezes every once in a while and I'll finally upload a short mp3 of how the HDD sounds like, so that I can get, if possible, some final feedback.

Thanks!