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Why are we talking about servers? We're way out in the weeds arguing about MTBF, SMART and bad sector counts. The OP has a pair of laptops making squirrel-in-the-attic noises and wants to know if the drives are about to die. <br />
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We don't know what brand hard drive or how old and abused they might be. If the drive is really &quot;growling&quot; (and it's not the fan) and the owner cares about the data, I say spend the $50 bucks per machine to replace the drives or at least set up an external backup drive and ride those disks til the sparks fly. It's the data that is valuable.<br />
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And, for the record, I didn't mean good drives last 2-3 years. I meant I consider 2-3 years to be a good run for crappy OEM drives...which is probably what came installed in the mystery laptops under current consideration.
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greg &nbsp;-about what pc model &nbsp;and disk are we talking here? &nbsp;post some specs plse
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@skullnobrains<br />
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That's pretty cool. I've never taken the time to do anything that scientific to kill a drive on purpose.<br />
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I wasn't trying to single anyone out with my comment. You mentioned servers, several others mentioned SMART. We were getting off topic and I was trying to get us back on point.<br />
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Speaking of the point, even with SMART or drive scanning tools, its not possible to be sure if a drive is OK or not. Maybe the media is fine but the spindle bearings are about to fly apart. SMART doesn't give that info. That's not to say such info is not useful but it doesn't tell you everything. Bad sectors don't make growling sounds. That's a mechanical symptom. In my experience, mechanical symptoms only ever get worse.<br />
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Therefore, my approach is to replace any drive displaying early symptoms of failure, especially funny noises. That's the only way to be (reasonably) sure your drive is OK...once you've ruled out the fan, of course.
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@gilnov : don't worry, i don't feel singled in any way. and you're right, this is drifting a little far from topic. nevertheless i do believe smart data is the first thing to grab, whatever that computer is used for. clicking on startup is actually often related to reallocated sectors though i'm unsure in which exact cases. faulty spindle bearings will usually produce a gt spinoff time and/or a bunch of automagically corrected read (CRC) errors or misreads ( missing the proper sector ) which are visible in smart. actually smart is not foolproof but much more efficient than what people tend to think. the problem is that they don't understand the readings, and rely on automated tools to give them a single-point-in-time status while the history is what gives the most useful information. additionally many vendors do not actually provide all smart data and smart displays the default values in that case which can be very misleading both for a human or an automated tool.<br />
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this might help to sched a light<br />
<a href="http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php" rel="ugc">http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php</a>
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@skullnobrains<br />
Very interesting. I learned something new today...which is true most days...except the days I'm not paying attention.<br />
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Hey, has anyone seen Natty Greg? Maybe he's busy extinguishing his flaming hard drives.
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lol ! or listening for scritches among scratches using a reversed clarinette ;) let's hope his computer is still alive !
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It is a Lenovo T520 bought it used, it has a hitachi hard disk in it. With a July 2010 date on it. When I bought it I did a format on it, wrote back the zeros -- because I heard the sounds. but in my experience once I hear the reading I think it's going.<br />
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Prior to me owning it I have no idea of usage.<br />
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Now I browse the internet, once in a while I might edit a picture.
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if you have another drive around - the easiest way to be sure it's the drive or not, is image it to another drive, then use that one<br />
note that i have had older drives which were rather noisy; the newest ones are barely audible
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Hard fact is that HDD are not reliable by any mean..so even if you have the slightest sign of failing its time to have a solid backup and buy the replacement....<br />
One of my horror stories was a new 3Tb Hdd...after testing a whole night with Sentinel and came clean..i copied all my files...to discover next morning it was dead...totally dead
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<blockquote>
after testing a whole night with Sentinel and came clean
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my bet is that is what killed your drive ;)<br />
testing/repairing/surface_<wbr />scanning/a<wbr />gressive_d<wbr />efrag on drives that are a bit old is the best way to kill them entirely. and additionally most of these actions are simply pointless.
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it was brand NEW...bought it from the store...placed it on HTPC and thought it would be a good idea to test it before copying everything....this not my worst horror story...i have one even greater
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wow ! feel free to post the drive models so we don't run into similar problems. actually we might consider building a hard drive blacklist. my personal experience makes me buy hitachi whenever i have a choice. actually i can hardly measure their failure rates : 0 for personal usage and next to 0 with dozens on them over more than 10 years on servers that are far from idle ( and we're not talking about SAS drives or expensive &quot;server quality&quot; in many cases )... while all other vendors already produced multiple failures after a couple of years with similar number of drives.
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I love this forum all I heard from you guys is pure passion. That means you take your work very serious, now you all make it hard for me to award points cause I've seen some great points from all of you. <br />
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So when I get home, I'll pick a solution and award points but I must say thank you all for participating.
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It was hard to pick so I went with the one closet to what I actually did
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How do you know for certain that your hard drive is failing, I have a couple computers running and there is no errors or blue screen of death, however after the drive spins up you can hear little scratching or growling sounds coming from the hard disk.
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How do you know for certain that your hard drive is failing, I have a couple computers running and there is no errors or blue screen of death, however after the drive spins up you can hear little scratching or growling sounds coming from the hard disk.

Hard Drive Failure

A laptop or notebook is a portable personal computer with a clamshell form factor, suitable for mobile use. Although originally there was a distinction between laptops and notebooks, the former being bigger and heavier than the latter, there is often no longer any difference. Laptops are commonly used in a variety of settings, such as at work, in education, and for personal multimedia. A laptop combines the components, inputs, outputs and capabilities of a desktop computer, including the display screen, speakers, a keyboard, and pointing devices (such as a touchpad or trackpad) into a single unit. The device can be powered either from a rechargeable battery or by mains electricity from an AC adapter.

Laptops Notebooks

Storage devices include any device used for storing and retrieving digital information. Hard disk drives (HDDs) use one or more rigid ("hard") rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. The primary competing technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), but HDDs remain the dominant medium for secondary storage due to advantages in price per bit and per-device recording capacity. CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable) is a digital optical disc storage format that allows information to be stored outside the mechanical HDD.