Failing Hard Drive

NissanSkylineN1

NissanSkylineN1

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Canada
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NissanSkylineN1
Xbox??? Who is this Xbox??
So,
My Seagate Barracuda sounds like its failing, and I am not surprised, as it is from 2006. It is a 320 GB SATA 3 hard drive. I am looking for buying a new hard drive and I was wondering if there is a way to not reinstall everything onto the new hard drive, such as purchasing another 320 GB hard drive and putting a disk image of my current drive onto it. Any ideas?
 
Well, I just ran a Seagate software test on my drive and it says pass... however, I'm still not convinced that this hard drive is perfectly fine. I mean, it only has 1800 hours of run time, but it makes the old hard drive noise... you know where it sounds like popping popcorn? My old PC had a pretty silent drive, and worked like a beast.

Normally, this drive sounds kinda like this, which is pretty normal for all hard drives:


However, sometimes, it kinda goes too far and sounds like its got a mad case of turrets and goes crazy and a bit alarmingly loud.
 
If it is failing, then cloning is probably not the best idea. Get anything important first.

Did you try a sector scan using HD Tune or a similar program?

NissanSkylineN1
but it makes the old hard drive noise... you know where it sounds like popping popcorn? My old PC had a pretty silent drive, and worked like a beast.
Click to expand...

The noise level is usually determined by firmware. Noisier drives are set-up more for performance.
 
Well, I found out one of the reasons behind the noise. Automatic Acoustic Management isn't supported by this hard drive, and its set to 254. Permanently. I will post a disk sector test once I've finished backing up my drive (Its reading at 28.8MB/S right now).
 
Download Acronis Drive Monitor and see what it says. It's a nice background utility that monitors disc activity.

You could purchase a larger hard drive than 320GB if your going to clone. Most cloning programs will either give you the option to just use 320GB of the new drive, or use more of the disk space.
 
I ran a disk error test, and it ran green all across. I will try the Acronis now and post my results.

EDIT: Health is 100 %
 
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Average "Mean Time Between Failures" (MTBF) of most hard drives is around 5 years I believe. All our servers we support at work get their drives replaced between the 3-4 year time frame. Most of these servers are in RAID setups and so if I do lose a drive early the clients are still running.

Sounds like just a noisy drive, but if your worried, then buy a new one and clone it.

Hard drive prices are higher than they used to due to problems in Thailand at HD manufacturing plants.

A seagate 7200RPM 320GB looks about $80.00 US on newegg.
 

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