Ok, ive noticed a high pitched whining coming from my Samsung SP0802N 80Gb HDD, ive narrowed it it down through trial and error and its 100% definitely this drive,

I downloaded and ran the samsung diagnostic utility in DOS, it said the drive was fine, i then rebooted and the bios hung at the HDD detection part and the drive started to click loudly , after i rebooted it was all fine, i then tried the diagnostic again it said the drive was fine then i rebooted and the same happened again bios hung and drive clicked, it took 2 reboots to get it to boot up XP,

Ive enabled S.M.A.R.T and it cant detect any probelms, ive ran a scandisck no bad sectors, it has not clicked anymore just those times after the diagnostic,

PC World will replace the drive if it is making noise and or fails a diagnostic, but the whining is barely audible but i know its there and alters as i access a folder,

All thats on the drive are two 40Gb partitions one for XP and another for backups from my second WD drive, so if the samsung dies then i wont lose any data that isnt already backed up on the other drive or DVD/CD

1. it is not the floppy disk drive

2. it is definitely the samsung drive

3. if anybody can help me interprit these S.M.A.R.T. readings because one number seems stupidly high 'hardware ecc recovered' = 159329805

Thanks in advance!


PS - if i take it to pc world now they might not replace it and it takes me ages to remove the drive and put it back in because im running an acrylic case and the board is connected directly to the back plus i have to loosen all drives to slip the hard drive out that includes all optical drives aswell whilst balancing a motherboard in one hand

When you ran diagnostics, was there option for quick and advanced scans? Sounds like the drive is definitely one that qualifies for RMA IMO. Look for some extensive scan in that diagnostics utility, surely it will fail.

A backup might not be a bad idea.

hahaha thanks for pointing that out!, well its sorted they replaced it on the spot no questions asked didnt even test it! and they replaced it with a Samsung 80Gb drive with an 8Mb cache! because my 2mb version was out of stock or they couldnt be bothered to look for it!