It's not a good sign when...

[NeoGen]

... you hear a few odd clicking sounds from your hard drive, everything slows down, and a second later a blue screen comes up.


Just happened to me twice in the last 24 hours... Something tells me I have to get a new one ASAP!!

[gatekeeper53]

Sounds like you need to get a new one yesterday lol

[spikey_richie]

Start taking those backups whilst you still can...

[NeoGen]

I think this is the chance for me to do something I've been wanting to for a while. I'm gonna get myself two small hard drives and set them in RAID 1 (Mirrored).
I'm thinking of two 160Gb hard drives, that are quite cheap nowadays, and I don't even need half of that space, so it's more than great.
My other concern is that they should be SATA drives, altough my little old machine doesn't support it, so I guess I'll have to add a SATA controller card to the bundle.
When I upgrade the machine someday, at least the hard drives will be perfectly compatible.

[NVM]

do you have S.M.A.R.T. ? check your BIOS and it should be turned on. it could help you(warn you) about a failing drive next time.

if it were me with this drive and there was important data on it, i would pull it out, set it to slave on another system, and drag all important stuff off of it, now.

[drezha]

Unfortunatly I think my drive is a RAID1 (I seem to remember seeing it somewhere in documentation) which is bad because I want one for system data, the other for documents.

I mean I backup my docs weekly to CD-RW but the hard drive copy is nice as well. Did have daily backups as well to my laptop but I've kept that turned off recently until I get some air to blow out the fans.

[NeoGen]

do you have S.M.A.R.T. ? check your BIOS and it should be turned on. it could help you(warn you) about a failing drive next time.

Yea, it's always been turned on but not giving any warnings.
The only time I ever saw S.M.A.R.T. complaining was on a friend's computer and it was saying something like that there were damaged sectors on the hard drive.
Those clicks I heard sounded kind of metalic, I'm afraid it might be something mechanical.

[spikey_richie]

If you got BSoD that quickly, it COULD have been your CPU fan...

[Opteron]

I think this is the chance for me to do something I've been wanting to for a while. I'm gonna get myself two small hard drives and set them in RAID 1 (Mirrored).
I'm thinking of two 160Gb hard drives, that are quite cheap nowadays, and I don't even need half of that space, so it's more than great.
My other concern is that they should be SATA drives, altough my little old machine doesn't support it, so I guess I'll have to add a SATA controller card to the bundle.
When I upgrade the machine someday, at least the hard drives will be perfectly compatible.

I don't know what Brand you like but watch the WD SATA 160's... Although the one I have has never given me any problems it runs at 107-F while a HDD with the exact same cooling is running at 73... Just food for thought... Good luck!!!

[AMDave]

clicks and beeps coming from the hard drive that sound out of the ordinary are likely to be the hardware recalibration sequence kicking in. This is the first (and usually the last) indicator of a HDD hardware failure. It is most often experienced with laptop harddrives which are prone to bumps and knocks (regardless of their impact rating), as I discovered about 2 months ago. In some of the laptop (2.5") drives, the recalibration sequence is so fast that it sounds like a BEEP. At this point you get what you can onto a network drive ASAP. Gee I wish I knew that before it happened.

If you buy and build to RAID-5 on your most critical machine you will be doing great.