Hard Drive Issue?

curjor

Member
I received my computer on tue (10/12/13) only to find out that my graphics card was faulty. after ringing up pcs and asking about what could be the problem they decided to ship out a sealed one to swap with my faulty one. When that I arrived and I replace the old one, it worked fine. however I think may have come across another issue and thought i would post it here if anyone had any clue.

My hard drive now does this frequent knocking sound, similar to a light knock on a table, following this whenever i try to use the hard drive for example open a folder inside or make a new folder/install something there, it makes a very loud chugging/grinding noise. which doesn't sound healthy.
I want to know if anyone has any idea on what this might and what to do, the must common answer from roaming the internet is to replace it,but I would like to avoid replacing a 3day old hardrive straight after replacing my graphics card. I have to hard disks follows:
1st Hard Disk 120GB KINGSTON V300 SSD, SATA 6 Gb (450MB/R, 450MB/W)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

the one that is making the loud knocking and chugging/grinding noise is the second one (1tbWD caviar)
also when booting up a game or program from the first hard drive (120gb kingston) I get a similar sound but very high pitched, ( a bit like a dentists drill) if anyone understands what I mean? I hope this isn't as bad as it seems, but it doesn't sound healthy. Only had this computer for 3 days and its driving me insane with the faults and problems.


tl;dr Hard drive makes knocking noise/ chugging/grinding noise any ideas what it might be.

Cheers for anyone who reads this hope to get an answer soon.
 

vanthus

Member Resting in Peace
Does sound like a faulty Caviar Black hard drive,not sure about the SSD though,I don't think it should be making any noticeable noise really.I think your only option is to give PCS a call as soon as possible.
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I agree that it does rather sound like the Caviar Black may need replacing. That's not as bad as it sounds though, first install Macrium Reflect from http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx and use that to take a full disk image of your HDD to an external HDD (if it's partitioned this image will copy all partitions) then install the replacement drive. Then fire up Macrium Reflect again and restore the image to the new HDD and all will be back as it was.

You might also download the free version of HDTune from http://www.hdtune.com/download.html, the free version can do some basic disk testing (and benchmarking) and you can look at the SMART data with it. The SMART data should tell you whether the drive itself is reporting errors. Also the Windows event log may have errors in there if there are HDD problems, look for any critical or error messages in there.

The SSD is silent (there are no moving parts) so any noise you're hearing is coming from somewhere else.
 

PokerFace

Banned
install Macrium Reflect from http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx and use that to take a full disk image of your HDD to an external HDD (if it's partitioned this image will copy all partitions) then install the replacement drive. Then fire up Macrium Reflect again and restore the image to the new HDD and all will be back as it was.

I installed a WD Caviar Black as my main drive and plan to use the old WD Green for back ups. If I use Macrium Reflect to save an image of the Black onto the Green, what happens when I make small changes to my main files (documents etc.), can I just save those files into the image, or would I need to make a completely new image every time I wanted to back up my documents?
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I installed a WD Caviar Black as my main drive and plan to use the old WD Green for back ups. If I use Macrium Reflect to save an image of the Black onto the Green, what happens when I make small changes to my main files (documents etc.), can I just save those files into the image, or would I need to make a completely new image every time I wanted to back up my documents?

If you get the free version of Macrium Reflect you'll have to take a new image every time you change anything, although you could take simple file copies of your changed documents etc. and copy them back after you restore the Macrium Reflect image.

If you buy the paid-for version of Macrium Reflect you can take differential or incremental backups.
 

PokerFace

Banned
Ok, thanks. I think once I've got my WD Black how I want it, I'll save an image onto the WD Green. I'll then just make separate backups of the files I change the most. At least I'll be able to reinstall the image if I have a problem with my primary drive and that should save a lot of work.

One last thing. If in future I was to save a fresh image, would I rewrite it over the existing saved image or save it as a separate one?
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Ok, thanks. I think once I've got my WD Black how I want it, I'll save an image onto the WD Green. I'll then just make separate backups of the files I change the most. At least I'll be able to reinstall the image if I have a problem with my primary drive and that should save a lot of work.

One last thing. If in future I was to save a fresh image, would I rewrite it over the existing saved image or save it as a separate one?

Each image uses a different file name so it doesn't overwrite. I create a separate folder for each image with the data and reason for the backup as the folder name. That makes it very easy to work out which image is which. :)
 

PokerFace

Banned
Each image uses a different file name so it doesn't overwrite. I create a separate folder for each image with the data and reason for the backup as the folder name. That makes it very easy to work out which image is which. :)

That makes sense. Thanks again. :)
 
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