Question About External Hard Drive

[Retrodude]

I was hoping someone here could give me some helpful info about this. I have a Western Digital 3TB external hard drive and there's a lot of stuff on there I don't want to lose. All morning it's been making noise like it's loading something and I'm wondering if this might be a problem.

Now, it usually makes noise when I actually load something from it, but then it stops after a minute or so, but today it's been making that noise almost nonstop and it feels slightly warm. I unhooked it from the USB port on my laptop and the noise stopped immediately, so I plan on leaving it unhooked for awhile just to let it rest and cool off. What I need to know is A) is this constant loading a problem? and B)if it is, what course of action would you recommend?

[Hobie-wan]

Is your AV scanning it? Is Windows indexing it?

[Retrodude]

Normally, when I open a folder, I have to wait a few seconds for the stuff inside the folder to load. Before I unhooked it, I opened various folders and they were alrerady loaded, so I guess what was going on was that windows was constantly loading the entire contents of the drive (~2TB). Is that what you mean by indexing?

[Hobie-wan]

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... ng-options

[Retrodude]

Okay, I plugged the external back in and it immediately started doing the constant loading thing again. I opened up the indexing options and saw that the external was not included in the list of stuff windows is indexing, so that's apparently not the issue. Any other ideas?

[Hobie-wan]

You checked AV too? Most AV be default will scan devices that are plugged in.

[Retrodude]

That doesn't seem to be the problem either. If I knew that it wasn't going to hurt anything, I wouldn't worry, but I'm concerned that if I leave it running like it is, the hard drive will burn out and I'll lose all my stuff.

[Hatta]

Boot a Linux live CD and plug in the drive. See if it behaves the same. That will tell you whether you have a hardware problem or a configuration problem. If the behavior remains even after booting a CD, I'd back the thing up and replace it asap.

[Menegrothx]

I've noticed that my external hard drive makes a lot of crackling noise and becomes very warm when it's working hard. It goes quiet and becomes cool again if I leave it plugged while it's not doing anything. Most of the time while I'm casually flipping through different folders it makes some crackling noises while loading. I think it's 3 or 3½ years old and it's almost full (1,9 T/2T)

Do external hard drives go bad over time? Is there planned obsolence involved?

[aaron]

hold shift on startup and boot to safe mode w/ command prompt, then run chkdsk e: /f

(where e: is whatever your drive letter is).