HDD about to fail?

I have 5 HDDs in my PC and one of them is making them an occasional horrible noise. I.e. I think it's about to die. Is there an easy way to tell which one it is? I could take them all out and disconnect one by one but this would takes ages. Any ideas?

I've ordered a Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache as the replacement.

Tou could try turning on SMART in your system BIOS, see if that detects the possibly bad drive.

I have 5 HDDs in my PC and one of them is making them an occasional horrible noise. I.e. I think it's about to die. Is there an easy way to tell which one it is? I could take them all out and disconnect one by one but this would takes ages. Any ideas?

I've ordered a Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache as the replacement.

richyroo1

(EDIT) Oh yeah, if you really need to know which it is, I'd try to get close to the case when the noise starts and remove the cover and listen for which drive the noise is emitting from. Other than that use the SMART thing everybody else suggested.

Backup your data now! Thats the first step.

Now if it making noises it suggests to me that one of the HDD'd maybe having a mechanical failure, if so a CHKDSK might not detect anything because it might not be making bad sectors. Listen which one it is and get ready to swap it.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I can't seem to find the SMART setting in the BIOS so haven't done that. The noise has now stopped so I can't work out which one it is. The new HDD is on its way though. I've backed up everything onto the Home Server so I'll have to try and catch it. Might leave the PC on for a while to see if I can get it to moan.