I bought one of these Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB hybrid drives last November, because I needed more disk space. It has worked very well. But I have been getting a weird noise that isn't quite the grinding noise of metal on metal, but it is continuous for several days. The Seagate SeaTools for Windows diagnostic program says that the drive is working just perfectly -- but I find myself wondering if there is some virus working the drive. Even with all programs closed, it does this.
I turned off automatic indexing. No change. I did a defragment. No change. I heard this behavior one before, and it was indeed a virus, probably trying to turn my computer into an international porn distribution network or something equally dangerous. But AVG 2013 finds no virus. SpyBot S&D finds nothing. MalwareBytes finds nothing. Any suggestions what to try next?
Back up everything and get a new hdd. Your current one is probably about to fail. It's probably not a virus or anything like that, just one of those "Hard Drives fail" issues.
ReplyDeleteI do second the "back up, NOW!" recommendation. If you haven't done a backup recently, this is a great reminder. I have google calendar send me a reminder email the first of the month to run a home backup.
ReplyDeleteAfter the backup, in the SeaTools program, don't do just a quick test, run the in-depth scan, whatever it's called. That should force the HD to re-read every sector.
It's firmware is going to be relatively new, and since HDD firmware is said to have become OS level complicated before adding flash memory fun, who knows?
ReplyDeleteI do an incremental backup every night -- maybe I will do a full backup now.
ReplyDeleteI ran the full test in SeaTools, without complaint.