Hard drive shutdown sound when computer is on

[aye29]

Occasionally my hard drive will make a sound that sounds like its shutting down while the computer is still turned on. If I go into my computer I can still access all of my drives just fine though. This only happens when I am downloading something but nothing running on my computer get interrupted when this happens. Should I be worried one of my hard drives might die soon?

 

[gigabyte1024]

run a chkdsk that'll tell you if there is problems
check SMART if you can, that'll be another indicator.
You could also check the power applet in control panel.


Always have a recent backup regardless of the state of your hard drive.

 

[[H]Opterown]

Sounds normal, my Hitachi does it.

 

[aye29]

I haven't run chkdsk yet but SMART looks ok. I can't be sure since some of my drives are connected to a Sil3114 SATA controller and I cant seem to get SMART data on those drives. All of my drives are Western Digitals. This only started happening when I installed Vista, it was fine in XP.

 

[digital_exhaust]

What OS are you running?

Edit!! God.. I am such a dumbshit!

Ok.. so it's Vista, I know this, as you clearly stated this fact in the above post.
The drive spinning down is 100% normal under Vista, it manages power differently than XP did... and as I said, it's normal.

On a side note, it scared the shit out of me the first time it happened, I was certain one of my drives had just died...

 

[aye29]

I was running Vista when it started.

 

[digital_exhaust]

See my edit... sorry, just kind of skipped over the part about Vista the first time Like I said, it's normal.