hello all.  Over the last 2 weeks or so, my hard drive has gotten noisier, louder and harsher sounding which I think is a precursor to failure.  The drive is a Seagate ST3200822A that came with the computer.  I might be wrong on that though.  My mom came over to the apartment (she leaves to go back to MA on March 14th, then I'm on my own.) and happened to hear the drive.  She asked me if anything can be done to stop or slow the drive from failing.  I told her no, but I thought I would ask the hive mind just to be sure.  Thanks for your time.

Oh, I was looking at harddrives on Newegg and was wondering what's the difference between Average Latency and Average Seek Time?  I assume having both numbers as low as possible is the thing for which to look.

No, you aren't going to slow or stop the eventual failure of this drive.  Prepare to replace it now and you won't suffer too much.

Repost this in the Urban Commandos forum and you'll get some good answers on this as well as the specs on drives.

depending on the problem.   freezing the drive can prolong its life.    

best thing to do is backup your data to cd, another computer, another hd.   then replace the failing drive

you can get another drive from newegg for 70 bucks link

back up every thing i had my harddrive fail on me 2 weeks ago it was less than a year old i lost ev ery thing

Quoted: No, you aren't going to slow or stop the eventual failure of this drive.  Prepare to replace it now and you won't suffer too much. Repost this in the Urban Commandos forum and you'll get some good answers on this as well as the specs on drives.

Ok, so I was right.  Oh, and I'll repost to that forum.  thanks.

Quoted: You shouldn't worry because you already have a backup plan in place, and functioning. Right? If not, take this time (and the drive's obvious warning to you) to backup your data, and get a simple and efficient backup system up and running.

No, unfortunately I don't.  I know, stupid stupid stupid.  I was just going through my desk and I have an unopened box of 50 CD-R's (700MB data/80min music).  The size of the drive is 200GB.  C:// is 180 GB (47.2GB used), D:// is 5.79GB (5.06GB used).  Hmm, that's odd, I'm not great at math but it seems that 15 or so GB has vanished into thin air.  Anyway, I have 52 or so Gigabytes used, I should have enough discs to back up everything right?

the more important question is what do you need backed up..     get on xfire asoldierwithm118lr    

I have drives that have been making bearing noises for over seven years and are still working.  My Vaio laptop hard drive has made a loud noise since 1998, and it still works.  It's not a good sign, but it isn't a sign that it's going to definitely fail in the short term.  I'd stop using as soon as possible, but I wouldn't pay overnight shipping for the replacement or do something risky in a rush.z