Seagate HDD ocasionally sounds like congested for a second

[mooglover]

Once or twice a day I hear my Seagate HDD (or CPU, i'm not sure, but i guess it's the hdd) makes a sound as it was congested for a second, like it intented to make a lot of things at once.
I'm a little worried about it.

Have you got any expirience on that?

[dmarques]

I would BACKUP the data first of all.
Then, try to scan it for bad sectors. If it has a lot, heads might be failing.

[mooglover]

Thanks guys! I'll scan it.

However the HDD doesn't make noise.
That "congestion" I told you (which last...i mean, less than 1 second) happens randomly during the day ONCE.
Else, it doesn't make any noise and works normally.

[Vulcan]

I wonder if this is the normal background Seagate scan which you are hearing, but in case the drive has an undiagnosed problem:

I'll scan it.

Backup first; scan second, as dmarques said earlier. Or are you willing to risk the (unknown) possibility that doing a scan of your disk kills it, if you don't already have a good backup? We have seen people "diagnose a drive to death" so be aware of that possibility. The suggestion from Spildit to collect the full SMART data (including raw values) to allow this data to be reviewed, is also a good one. Even though you think the drive is working normally, it might still have a latent problem...

[mooglover]

thanks guys.
here's the smart data. i have two drives.

Seagate 1tb


Seagate 500gb

[Vulcan]

Thanks for the SMART data.

I see no concerns on the 1TB drive (although, as always, that does not prove that there is no problem). On the 500GB drive, there have been problems in the past - see the non-zero values for SMART attributes 0xBB and 0xBC. The attribute values does not show how recently those problems occurred.

Other things you could do include (a) just keep monitoring the SMART data regularly, or (b) use smartctl from the smartmontools suite to see if the drive supports providing its internal error log, which may give more clues about when those read problems occurred and if they were recent then that's a worry, or (c) run more tests e.g. a throughput test (e.g. I think HD Tach and HD Tune can do that, but you would need to check for yourself), to see if there is any evidence of areas of slowness caused by internal retries.

In summary: I am more concerned about the 500GB drive than the 1TB drive. As long as you have up-to-date & verified backups, and a plan for what you would do if you had a drive failure, then if (when!) one of the drives does fail, it won't be a disaster for you.

[ShaneWard]

probably a crappy fan in the power supply, or cpu fan or case fan, they sometimes make strange noises when constantly used.