Since there are a lot of sales out there, I picked up a new HD from Comp USA. It's an Internal Seagate 160GB SATA 7200 8mb cache....It was a pretty good deal at 100 bucks for the retail version too. Anyway here's my question.

It seems to be working great, but making some excessive read/write noise. It is very quite when idle, but when I go to scroll over a decent amount of video in PP, it seems to make a lot of noise. This isn't true of my 200GB Maxtor that came with my computer. Also, on occasion the new Segate seems to make a very slight hum and a rythmic clicking. I'm not sure if this is it just thinking in the backround, it is a very soft noise, or there is something wrong with it. I havn't dropped it or anything and I assume it is just regular working noise, but I was just curious after Segate having the reputation for being the quietest, (which it is at idle), and making all this read write noise.

PS. I already had some trouble at Comp USA today so, I'm really really hoping this is just normal, or I can just ignore it. Thanks!

Newer drives are pretty quiet, although not silent. I have a couple 300GB Seagate SATA drives and they don't make audible clicks during normal operation, nor do my somewhat older Maxtors. I can sometimes just barely hear the static-like sound of read-write operations over the whir of the cooling fans, but it is a soft and familiar sound. So if you're hearing odds clicks and such during read/write operations, there's a fair chance they are due to some hardware fault.

QUICKLY, back up all your data! Then, the drive should have come with a utility floppy disk that contains a diagnostic utility -- give it is spin. If you don't have the utility, download it from the Seagate site:

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

I've not had used Seagate's utilities, but have done with Western Digital and Maxtor and they worked well.

Ok, so I returned the drive and got a replacement. After I installed it it sounded quieter. It is still louder than my other drive, I am pretty sure it is quieter than before. I have since switched it so the new one is my boot drive. It got a little bit noiser than before now that all the programs are running off of it. Now that I have compared two of the same, I believe its just a noisier read/write than my other one. Even if it goes dead somehow, it was only a 100 bucks and isn't holding my A/V files. Thanks Peter. Anybody else have noise hard drives?