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?

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

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

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

Does it have a cooling fan??

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

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

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

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.

Back up now

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

Peace
Andy.

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!

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.

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.