Did I just shorten my hard drives life?

[Wang191]

I was copying files from one harddrive to another and the hard drives started making really loud clunking noises, i had heard this once earlier too. I went over to check on them and realised they were very hot. I since placed a fan on them and they havn't made that noise since.

I'm an idiot for not making sure they had proper cooling but do you think i severly damaged them? One drive is brand new and the one i'm copying from has only seen about 48 hours of total "on" time ever.

[HotkeyCC]

If it's not making sounds anymore, it should be ok. You aren't an idiot, most people don't cool their harddrives=)

[4keatimj]

If the noise does persist, make a backup of all your data. Any sound (apart from the usual head seek noise, which I'm guessing in this case isn't) coming from the hard drive is normally a warning of failure. A large amount of heat from the hard drives is also not a good sign. But, having said that, almost every home computer doesn't have hard drive cooling, and thats fine. Hard drives don't make too much heat, and the heat they do (normally) produce does not affect them, or their lifetime. So your not an idiot for not cooling them, but if they are unnacceptably hot, then they may have a problem.

[Wang191]

It was uncomfortably hot to the touch.

When the data finishes copying to the drive I will have 2 hard drives with the same data on them. Then I plan on taking a third and doing a backup to that. That will leave me with one active drive and two for backing up to. Hopefully 2 of the 3 don't go bad at the same time and i'll trust that my data is reasonably safe.

I just don't want to see these drives fail and take my data with them. (obvioulsy)

The drive i'm copying to is on a highpoint raid controller card (not in raid). When i tried placing the drive in a hot swap bay they made the same noises. So i took them out and placed them on 3.5 inch to 5.25 inch adapter brackets. I didnt' expect to hear that noise again, especially because of the heat.

[Wang191]

Oh, I just remembered. The raid card has a speaker on it to warn you of a drive failure or other problems. As it was clunking the speaker started to make the noise breifly and then stopped; and it went on its way copying data.

[spartus4]

I have had many problem with them making a clunking sound. If I were you I would call western digital and see about getting a replace ment.

[MScrip]

I have read that if you plan on copying large amounts of data to a drive, you should do it in small increments, like 15GB or so. This is so the drive can cool off after a huge amount of head access.

I think this is somewhat true, because I put an older Seagate 120GB drive in an external enclosure, and copied about 80GB at one time. The drive was perfectly fine in my old computer, but after the large transfer it started to make funny noises. It stopped shortly afterwards, and I think I have learned a lesson.

Anyone else have info on such a phenominon?