External Hard Drive Accesses Like Crazy... Even When Not Attached to a Computer!

[Jace-BeOS]

i don't know if this is the right place to ask, but...

i have a Lacie external hard drive. It's one of those older 135GB "Porche" grey/silver boxes. It's never been a problem for me, but it DOES do something that worries me. When it's idle a while, suddenly it will start making access noise. A LOT of it. i fussed with Windows drive monitor tools (XP and Vista) several times and found no actual accessing being done. Then, when i had the computer shut off, i found the drive was doing it anyway! When it starts this, i can access it locally or through the network and a few clicks through the drive's folders will get it to stop grinding for a little while till it does it again.

i don't remember if it's always done this. i don't think it has. i am paranoid about drive failure since i had a drive develop bad sectors on me (don't know if it was from disuse) and another (two??) seem to be much noisier now that they spent 2 years sitting unused (no bad sectors yet). i have so very little money to throw at maintenance and drives have balooned in cost since the Thailand flooding...

Anyone else encounter this kind of thing?

[tropicalontour]

Could be the drive's own firmware doing housekeeping, like remapping bad blocks, etc.

[Jace-BeOS]

Housekeeping? Wow.
Blocks, not sectors? Where can i read more about drive firmware housekeeping? i'm not familiar with the topic. i hadn't realized there was such a thing (embarrassingly).

[deleted]

DELETED

[seismic1]

If it's a RAID unit, it could be doing internal housekeeping independently of the host OS. Scheduled parity/consistency checks etc.

[timobrien]

Does it have a cooling fan??

You may be hearing dust in the fan that needs cleaning....

[james0tucson]

i don't know if this is the right place to ask, but...

i have a Lacie external hard drive.

I've seen Lacie, Maxtor, and WD externals that are really multiple drives in some kind of array, pretending to be a single drive. When that is the case, there is a somewhat more complex internal controller than in single drives. For the record, I've always considered this cheating. If you peek inside your drive case, let me know if it's 1 drive or 2 in there. If it's just one drive, I'd suspect that it's singing it's swan song. I'd demote it to a non-critical application or make it into art. Your data value may vary

[jancivil]

yeah, I encountered it with my now quite dead LaCie drive.

[Jace-BeOS]

So, then the opinion is that it's not doing housekeeping, but dying instead?

it's a single drive, i'm pretty sure, since it's so small. There's no space for it to have anything but one 3.5" drive in there.

[risome]

Back up now

[ZenPunkHippy]

Back up now

This. Get as much data off as possible and replace the disk ASAP.

Peace
Andy.

[tenshin111]

I have a similar drive, just bigger (320GB) - it is actually a single 3.5" Samsung (if I remember correctly) hard drive in a nice, silver 'Porsche' enclosure

If you ask me, I would say it does not sound healthy. Back it up as soon as possible!

[LBN]

[PHassan]

My recommendation would be to use a s.m.a.r.t. monitoring tool, and the best in my opinion is:
http://www.hdsentinel.com/
If your drive is supported - and it probably is - then it will tell you what is the state of your hard drive.
Its a great piece of software.

[JimmiG]

Back up now

Actually, you should already have backups, so a drive that's about to die shouldn't cause any concerns. Never store important data in only one place. Three places is ideal - for example two separate hard drives and in the cloud or at a remote location.