Desktop Hard Drive Noise Question

On my desktop PC, one of my 7200RPM hard drives just started making a lot of noise tonight. Seems to be related to regular rotation rather than accessing, because the noise seems pretty constant, regardless of whether I'm reading/writing from the drive. I already copied off all the important data on the drive, but I'm just kinda wondering if it's just a matter of time before it dies, or if hard drives can suddenly "become noisier" with no immediate ill effects other than the noise.

So is my drive likely to burst into flames within the next few days? Is it fine to use it as a temp drive until it blows out? The drive seems to work fine, and the noise isn't quite up to aircraft levels, but it's definitely louder and whinier than it was. Just curious if anyone's had this happen before.

My fluid bearing Maxtor 80GB drives seem to have gotten noisier about 4 months ago. They still work though. One of them is in my Tivo and the other in my MP3 server. Both are on 24/7 and still work fine. I probably wouldn't be too concerned, just annoyed.

just annoyed.

Yeah, really. I'm assuming there's no clause in any hard drive warranties which allows for an exchange when the thing sounds like a band saw.

As a side note, I bought some Samsung 120GB 5400 RPM drives to replace the Maxtors. My Tivo and MP3 server don't need 7200RPM. I bought them because I have a Samsung 40GB in my webserver for the past year and it is still silent. Even more silent than my fluid bearing Maxtors were when new.

The Maxtor 80 in my TiVo seems to have gone the same way.

I dropped a 120 in it today, and when I get back in a 10 days I'm thinking of vacating the 80.

Have you tried running the maxtor amset utility ? I ran it on my 120 gig maxtor in my shuttle and it is much quieter. I can't hear the drive at all even with the fan off. Now I just need to order a better fan.

Yeah, when I got the drive I ran it before installing in the TiVo.

Yeah, you'd think hard drives could last a little longer than a year or two. Oh well, as I was diagnosing the problem I suddenly remembered that I have another drive of the exact same model from when I was running my system with RAID-0. So I swapped the noisy one out for a quiet one off the shelf. In a few months I plan on building a second system, so we'll see if the drive gets better with a little R&R.