How's everyone doing, great? That's super. Alright here's the situation. I bought my first SATA drive (Seagate 320G) sometime around early 2007 and was using it galore (torrents/PVR). For months it was fine, until it seemed I had filled it a little too much (less then 5G remaining). At that point, I began hearing a noise which sounded like a click followed by a twang a couple seconds later. This would then repeat every 20-30 seconds, over and over, until I either canceled the action or Explorer basically timed-out and gave up on its own. The reason I say I might have filled it too much is because I'm imagining the drive head moving out further and further to the edge as the drive fills up and perhaps when put to its limit of movement, something physical happened with its mechanics. Also, to be specific, the 'click' sounded like a wooden matchstick dropped into its box, a rather faint single impact, and the 'twang' sounded almost like a very small spring being plucked, though I don't suspect it was an actual spring. The data seemed to be there and intact and Disk Manager didn't show anything unusual, it was just hanging on every attempt to access it. So figuring it was purely a mechanical failure, I ran out to buy another drive with the hopes of salvaging whatever files I could before sending it off for replacement by Seagate. Drive #2, another SATA, this time a Western Digital 500GB. When I first got this drive up and running, I put it to use immediately for PVR and thought I'd get around to the data recovery as soon as I had the time. I unplugged the failing 320G drive completely so at the very least, it wouldn't get any worse. A couple months later, I plugged it back in and was surprised to see it show up fine and with no noises at all. I copied everything over to the newer drive without a single hic-up or corrupt file. I was then planning on formating it and having it replaced by Seagate but again, was in no real hurry. For the following few months it still hadn't made any noises, so I slowly began using it more and more. Infact to this day, I am still using it without any further problems but I still don't feel I can trust it. Fast forward to mid-2008, the 500G WD drive suddenly and without warning decided to go missing in Explorer. Turned out the data cable might have loosened because after fiddling with it, the drive reappeared unharmed. This happened a couple more times over the next month, so I started looking into a better cable for it (seems there are 'latching' cables you can buy, so I guess I'm not the only one). However, the last time Explorer stopped showing the 500G, and messing with the cables didn't work, I checked in the Disk Manager and found the 'type' was now showing as Dynamic instead of Basic. Long story short, I had to use a data recovery application to salvage everything new to that drive, back over to my untrustworthy 320G drive. I then reformated the 500G and copied the entire 320G drives contents over yet again. This time I was blaming Windows for somehow dropping the ball, so I wasn't yet worried about the 500G needing replacement. For about a month, I was back to using both drives nervously, but without trouble, until a couple weeks ago, when the 500G drive completely went AWOL again. This time, even Disk Manager couldn't spot it. Knowing it was going to take another 23 hours worth of indexing by the data recovery tool before I could even start this all over again, I just went out and bought yet another 500G drive, this time a Seagate. I have the WD 500G unplugged and both the Seagates up and running. I partitioned the newest 500G into 4 chunks to save time with any future recovery indexing and right up until today, had yet to write a single Byte onto it. Well wouldn't you know it, while trying to move a few things off the 320G onto the 500G, the 500G starts making its very own click noise and the Windows dialog animation for file transfers just starts showing more and more time required to complete. After canceling the process, the clicking stops and all seems fine again. The drive still shows up in Explorer and Disk Manager seems cool with everything, it just won't work without hic-ups (it copies a little then hangs, clicks, and then copies a little more, etc). Both Seagates seem to have mechanical issues and the Western Digital has who knows what issues. Am I cursed or what? I've downloaded the Seagate disk tools and they wouldn't even acknowledge the 320G or the newest 500G even though both are still showing in Explorer just fine. Not sure what the problem there is, but I doubt they would help anyway. So here I am with what should be 1.32 TeraBytes of harddrive space and only the dodgey 320G is usable and it only has about 30 Gig free (fill it much more and I fear I'll be down to just my old 80G OS drive). Although I'm not accessing the 500G Seagate whatsoever, I do hear a noise (like the sound a CD drive makes on spin up, like something sliding for a second) about once every 5-10 minutes. In retrospect, it might have been making that noise since I bought it, it's easy to not pay attention at this point. I'm at my wits end. Do I pay twice the price for the same size drive in an attempt to get higher quality? Do I maybe stay away from OEM altogether? Or should I maybe grab a large IDE drive for pure backup storage purposes? I thought SATA drives were not just faster but more stable, reliable and even quieter. But as you can see, my experience has been a data risking nightmare. Please advise.

Unless I missed it in your lengthy post I don't see where you maintain any backups. You do understand that hard drives will eventually fail and can become corrupted or infected at any time. Disk Defragmentation will not even run with less than 15% free space. You state you had only 5GB on the 320GB drive. That meant the drive had to hunt for places to write files in pieces because there may not have been sufficient contiguous space available. WinXP seems to automatically partition added SATA disks as Dynamic disks. My first thoughts concerning your hard drive issues is that they are overheating. I don't know what kind of case you have but it sounds like you have it full. Check your system temps and run speedfan to check drive temps. Heat can destroy a hard drive. Install all new hard drives by using the drive manufacturers tools for setting up a new hard drive. And of course, start backing up stuff. You have been fortunate so far. You may not think so, but at least you have been able to recover your data. Consider using mirroring two or more drives in an array. Newegg.com currently has Seagate 640GB drives for $75. Finally, all drive manufacturer's make good and bad products. IMO the larger drives are less fault tolerant due to the higher arial density used. That means a smaller piece of the platter is used to store each chuck of data. So any misalignment of the heads may make the data unreadable. Current drives are storing 320GB on one platter. That said, storage has never been cheaper. You can now buy TWO 1TB drives for what I paid for my first 120MB drive. There is no excuse for not duplicating data.

This may not have anything to do with your HD problems, but what mode are the drives under in the BIOS ? Is the SATA mode set to IDE ? Also, have you tried plugging one or more of the drives into a different connector ? Do you also have an SATA optical drive ?

Your hard drive might be overheated. Do you have front side fan? Maybe you should buy a cooler for the hard drives. There might be a problem with the SATA controllers, what motherboard are you using? It happened to me also a few weeks ago. One of the 7 hard drives I have in my computer made click sound and stopped responding. In my case it was the PSU cables fault. They were not properly connected to the hard drives. I fixed the problem by changing the cables. Check your PSU cables, this might be the problem. Also check your motherboard and if the computer case is too hot. Give a chance to the Trance.