Ok, so my computer had been doing this for as long as I can remember. I’ll be working on it when out of nowhere you can hear a semi-loud click, then what sounds like a drive spinning down (from full RPM to 0).
I’ve had NO problems with any of the drives… after said thing happens, I can view all the HDD’s and DVD roms with no lag or anything. I’ve tried producing said noise on multiple occasions but can’t figure out whats doing it.
It happens so quick and random, you don’t have enough time to look inside the case to see exactly where it’s coming from. This can happen multiple times in a day, or once in a month.
Any of the IT crowd ever experiance this? What could it be? Is it possible that it’s neither a CD-Rom or a HDD? (PSU “switching” or something?)
I’ve tried unplugging HDD’s and CD-Roms but like I said, the noise is so random that I really can’t rule out one or the other if doesn’t make said noise.
Are there any software programs that will check a HDD or CD-Rom for operation? Perhaps that would cause said noise?
Is it your drive powering down to save power? My external drive does it when its not used for a certain amount of time and I think internal drives can do this too when they are not being used for x amount of time.
Is this a hardware thing? Or a vista thing? Now that I think about it, I’ve never heard it while in OSx, only windows vista (possibly XP too, but don’t recall)
edit: wouldn’t this cause lag though when looking through “x” drives because it would have to spin back up? (actually, have never noticed any drive audibly spinning back up afterwords either)
My external drive is indexed in vista. When its not active for a while, it shuts off. If i go into the drive in explorer, i see the main files there. If I listen tho, I can hear it spin back up when I go into any of the folders tho.