Holy cow, I am getting what I believe to be excessive hard drive noise and it is freaking annoying! It seems that this all started after I formatted my drive to revert back to Windows XP Media Centre. Since then my hard drive has been making intermittent grinding noise that occurs in bursts of about 6-12 grinding sounds. Then it will stop making noise for a few seconds before starting up again: ghkkk...ghkkk...ghkkk...it's like listening to someone snore constantly, two feet away from me! I'm fairly certain my hard drive wasn't this noisy to begin with.

 

I have a Western Digital WD5000KS. It is 500Gb, 3Gb/s I believe. Apparently they've been touted as one of the few high capacity HDDs with cool and quiet operation. Lies! Of course, it could be the drive is failing for some odd reason, I've heard excessive grinding can be caused by this. But I just got this Dell XPS a month ago! I've tried setting the HDD Acoustic Mode to Quiet int he BIOS settings menu,but nothing changed from when it was set to Bypass. I downloaded the WD Diagnostics Program from Western Digital to check for problems but it passed the test with no problems.

 

Is this something I should be worrying about drive failure over? Should I consider using the warranty? Anybody having a similar problem even? Anybody know of some firmware or software that I might have missed despite my indepth searching?