Noisy HDD and 100% Disk Usage

[Gabby2805]

I have been using a Toshiba P300 7200rpm 3TB HDD along with a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo SSD for less than a year.

 

I've always thought my HDD has been quite noisy and its increasingly worrying/annoying me and I'm wondering if I should consider getting it replaced while its still hopefully under warranty. Sometimes I'm not doing anything in particular but my Advanced SystemCare monitor tells me the HDD is at 100% usage even though there are no 'processes with high I/O'. When its at 100% for these few seconds, it grinds/scratches fairly loudly, its probably the loudest part of my build and I have 5 fans. 

 

The drive is less than 1/3 full and I do not use it heavily at all, it seems fairly random and can even be idle when it randomly shoots to 100% and gets noisy...perhaps its the antivirus or something running in the background when idle but I still wouldnt expect such noise or 100% usage.

 

I don't know whether I should be worried because SMART doesn't detect a problem and I've not noticed any other signs of failure and its also not been through any of the main causes of failure, its always been like it but its either doing it more often now or Im just noticing it more and it annoys me. It isnt hot or slow or have corrupt files or anything like that...it just makes noise!

 

It does seem like my model may just be a noisy one so if there are any other Toshiba HDD users, I'd appreciate knowing if you find yours loud too. Nevertheless, the noise does seem a little excessive/unnecessary.

 

Advice?

[AvocadosGuac]

Reinstall windows

[Gabby2805]

Just now, Jrock said:

Reinstall windows

Windows is installed on my SSD. I am planning on buying a second smaller SSD and resetting my computer completely, reinstalling windows onto the new SSD and formatting the large SSD and HDD I have now before just using them for storage. But since Windows isnt installed on this drive, do you think it will make a difference to the noise? I haven't heavily used it in the 9ish months its been up and running.

[AvocadosGuac]

Just now, Gabby2805 said:

Windows is installed on my SSD. I am planning on buying a second smaller SSD and resetting my computer completely, reinstalling windows onto the new SSD and formatting the large SSD and HDD I have now before just using them for storage. But since Windows isnt installed on this drive, do you think it will make a difference to the noise? I haven't heavily used it in the 9ish months its been up and running.

Its probably dying then.

 

Might wanna get an RMA

[martward]

Probably not your problem, but I had something similar once which turned out to be caused by my PCI wifi card. If I installed the wifi card the disk usage would go to 100% all the time, when I removed it it would just chill again. You could try to take it out and use a cable, I would be very interested to hear if that was the problem.

[Gabby2805]

1 minute ago, Jrock said:

Its probably dying then.

 

Might wanna get an RMA

 

Ok thanks... its just that its always been noisy and it doesnt show any other symptoms of failure nor has it suffered heat/time/trauma or anything like that so I'd be surprised if it was already failing. Perhaps its been faulty from the start though.

[Gabby2805]

2 minutes ago, martward said:

Probably not your problem, but I had something similar once which turned out to be caused by my PCI wifi card. If I installed the wifi card the disk usage would go to 100% all the time, when I removed it it would just chill again. You could try to take it out and use a cable, I would be very interested to hear if that was the problem.

 

Oh wow how weird! I do have a PCI wifi card... I don't know if using a cable would be a possibility for me at the moment but maybe I'll try taking it out for curiosity! That would give me peace of mind really because the only thing the 100% usage causes is noise! It has no impact on performance whatsoever, its always very fast.

 

Thanks for sharing your story, that could be really helpful!