I'm getting worried about my pc. ; The drive in the computer seems to be running constantly- just non stop clicking away. ; It's a dell probably 2-3 years old and never did this before the last month or so. ; I don't keep many files actually on the computer itself- all my pictures and music are on a pair of 1tb external drrives (one backs up the other.) ; I did a virus scan and ran spybot and cleared a few things out and still it continues. ; I'm not really much of a computer guy so any advice would be really appreciated.
Clicking is physical, and unfortunately OEMs use the cheapest possible components to build, so I would give most modern desktops only up to 3 years before failure. ; My wife's OEM HD failed exactly 3 years after we bought it (except that her failure was that the boot sector crashed, so she didn't lose any data, I just had to buy another HD, the recovery DVDs, and then reinstall the original OS and use an external SATA dock for her old HD.) My guess is your hard drive is on it's death bed. ; I'd begin preparations for replacing it. ; In theory you could ghost it now and put a new one in.....
Clicking is not good - let's make it triplicte - BACK UP NOW!! If it were just 'running' constantly - spinning the drive and triggering cooling fans, that may not be a disk failure...just something running in the background. ; But if you hear clicking, or a scratchy rubbing sound, that's usually bad.
Have you looked at the Task Manager to see if some app is using up CPU? ; For instance, the Indexing Service is notorious for causing unnecessary activity on the hard drive.
While we're on the subject of hard drives, has anyone used the new solid state drives yet and if so, what are your thoughts? ; I have heard that the significantly increase computer performance, so I was thinking about using one in my next computer. ; My plan is to use a solid state drive for windows and programs and put all of my files on a 2TB SATA drive.
First off, clicking. ; Can you be certain it's the drive and not something to do with a cooling fan? ; In my case they can sometimes be difficult to tell apart. Secondly, SSDs.. ; I don't think they're ready for prime time yet, except for people who really want to spend the serious money to get the latest and greatest. ; I find they're mostly being marketed towards gamers who want the fastest possible transfer rates. ; For computer games loading times can be a big deal, ya'know, always waiting for the next level to load up. ; For a while I was running a RAID setup and I was the fastest of anyone I ever played with. ; Of course that meant that I was always waiting for everyone else to load up, but.. that gives you an idea of the mentality. ; I got a kick out of being the first, I felt smug about the speed of my system. I have some serious concerns about their longevity. ; There's a key point here, SSDs are all flash based memory. ; And flash based memory degrades itself as it is written to. ; These SSDs have a fixed lifetime ahead of them, and I don't know how long that life time is in typical computer usage scenarios. ; It may well be quite acceptable, but I just don't know what it is and for the moment it concerns me. I also don't know how much of an performance gain you'd see in choosing an SSD over a reasonably fast HDD. ; I guess I wouldn't be surprised if your apps loaded up faster, but you might try to find some benchmarks in real world situations. I found some benchmarks on tomshardware.com, my typical first stop in terms of hardware comparison testing.. but.. they're all artificial benchmarks. ; I really wish they'd do a test that just shows how long it takes, to, say, start up Photoshop or boot up into the OS. Their benchmarks show significant performance increases for an SSD, but I really don't know what that would mean in terms of loading up PS or doing real world tasks like that.
Thanks Dan. ; I couldn't find any real testing data either which is why I was asking... ; I probably won't be building the computer for at least a year, so I can wait and see what the reviews are between now and then.
