Is my HDD about to die on me?

[LightShadow]

Have a Packard Bell TS11-HR here and have it the best part of a year and a half. Yesterday, I had some issues with the system refusing to either shutdown or restart using the OS buttons (Windows 8). Now I have discovered in Task Manager the Disk Usage is always at 100%, even when idle, and I've run the built in scanning options and they all report the drive is fine.

Would you say the drive is going to die soon? Or are there are recommended programs to scan the drive with?

WDC WD5000BPVT-22HXZT1 is the model given by system properties.

[Haggis Veteran]

any scans running etc at the time?

boot into safe mode is it the same?

[Farstrider]

The fact that the drive is running at 100% should not necessarily be an indication that it's going to die. To me it sounds like something your OS is doing. Use Western Dig's HDD tools and see what that says. If the drive passes then it's very likely it could just be a software issue. A very small chance that faulty RAM could also be causing this but the odds are small.

Go here for the Western Digital HDD tools for your drive.

[stockwiz]

those SMART monitoring programs were useless in telling me my data drive was about to fail, my first drive failure in my life, not a bad track record, however the programs did not show a problem. Having the drive disappear from windows randomly (something windows 8 is NOT good at handling might I add, it freezes it up real good if you are transferring files when it happens) and hearing clunking noises coming from the drive, those were my clues. Fortunately everything was backed up to a portable drive sitting right there on top of the case.

Lesson learned... backing up saved dozens of hours of time spent on the files saved.

[f0rk_b0mb]

those SMART monitoring programs were useless in telling me my data drive was about to fail, my first drive failure in my life, not a bad track record, however the programs did not show a problem. Having the drive disappear from windows randomly (something windows 8 is NOT good at handling might I add, it freezes it up real good if you are transferring files when it happens) and hearing clunking noises coming from the drive, those were my clues. Fortunately everything was backed up to a portable drive sitting right there on top of the case.

Lesson learned... backing up saved dozens of hours of time spent on the files saved.

Get an SSD and to a fresh install on your OS just to be sure. From what you described above, it might be. :( If there is anything that you need on that drive, back it up.

[tsupersonic]

If you have to ask, back it up immediately.

[The Evil Overlord]

are you sure it's not just the microsoft compiler?

edit

Wait, nevermind, you said 'drive' usage, I mistook for process usage

[carmatic]

SMART data isnt the only way to tell.. like someone already said, listen for the hard disk noises too, any unpleasant sounds or ticking is bad news... or if you hear it spin up again and again, thats bad too

[Som]

personally i use seatools to check for errors in my hdds , I find the cd version (DOS) better than the windows... i'm pretty sure western digital have diagnostic software too though