Drive spinning up and freezing

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

I have an older computer I'm planning on using as a HTPC. I reused an old 120gig IDE hard drive and a 500gig sata hard drive which I'm using to store video and other ****. Right now im still working on gettign everything ready but when the HDDs are on sometimes I will hear a one of the drives spining up while the screen freezes up simultaneously for about 30 seconds. This didnt happen before I reformated the IDE drive. When the screen freezes up i can feel both drives vibrating (noticeably) . Could one of the drives be about to fail? and if it is how can i tell before it does. I dont mind if the IDE fails but if the sata drive fails I have no way to back up my dvd rips since all of my other drives are full.

Both the drives are from Seagate
IDE drive is a couple of years old and was recently reformatted this also the same drive im booting Vista from.
Sata drive is less than a year old.

Could it be vista since ive heard people say that vista will turn the second drive off and on while its not in use.

2

It's not Vista.
Buy an external harddrive and backup, or buy shitloads of dvd's and rar all your files and split them in 4,6gb files... That way you just need to take that rar file from one dvd and put together with all the other rars and then just extract.. You will then have all the files in one folder.

3

I'd be hard-pressed to diagnose the problem, though you could try looking at the control panel settings to make sure the drive isn't being turned off in a hibernate-type fashion. But really, that wouldn't explain the symptoms you're seeing.

Since they're both Seagate drives anyway, download Seagate's hard drive test program (you can make a boot cd to run it) and check the drives. Two or more bad sectors is an indication (though not in any way a guarantee) that the drive is failing. Do the long test and see what the status of each drive is.

Hope that helps.

Vedikur - Lanslide Gaming PCs:
The Gaming Computer Built For LAN Parties.

4

About time you RMA and get a new one.