HDD accessing even when not connected - Is it dying?

[rellio1]

Hi

My secondary hard drive (1TB Seagate, about 3yrs old) has been annoying me for some time now. It repetitively makes noises like it is accessing data - about 30 seconds on, then 10 seconds of rest. I've had a hard drive die before (click of death) but this just sounds kind of like normal HDD noises. I tried every solution I could find on google without success.

Today, I was playing around in my PC and disconnected the SATA cable from the drive, but left the power plugged in. As I'm writing this post I can hear it working away even though I never plugged the SATA cable back in.

What's going on with it? Clearly it's something internal to the HDD itself since the OS is out of the equation. I swept for bad sectors but didn't find any. Is this another sign of creeping death? Should I be shopping for a new drive?

Thanks

rellio1

[es9j4]

That's some SMART automatic offline testing. It can be probably disabled by the smartctl utility in linux.

[BlackST]

Ditto.

(at least it sounds like - without seeing the drive).