Noisy Hard Disk

[TechSupp]

On my home PC the Hard Disk seems rather noise when it is accessing the disk, (I was given the PC and it has always sounded this way), runs fairly well but does seem to access the disk quite alot. I have 1Gb ram (max it can take) but even when accessing a web page or starting a program it seems to access the disk quite a lot (maybe I'm noticing it more because its noisy?). Would this be because its a slow hard disk maybe and wouild swapping the HD have a significant benefit on performance. Its a SATA drive. The drive is a:

Western Digital Caviar SE SATA WD1600JD

Read Seek Time 8.90 ms (Average)

Controller Buffer Size on Drive 8 MBytes

 

if that helps?

 

P.S. I have run a virus and spyware check etc. Its been like this since I was given it, maybe thats why it was being given away!

Edited May 27, 2009 by TechSupp

[Michael]

You sure it's not the flashing LED creating all the noise? Most hard drives are fairly quiet these days. You could try running a scandisk if you haven't done so in a while. It sounds to me your computer might be writing to the page file a lot (if you're running low on physical memory), but you shouldn't be running out of memory by just browsing the web. Internet Explorer isn't that demanding thankfully

[TechSupp]

No, its definately the HD not the light. Ran a scandisk previously with no effect.

[Michael]

Best advice would be to backup anything critical. If it does fail, hard disks are really cheap if you compare prices to a year ago. The price vs capacity ratio keeps forever growing.