Anyone get weird noises from their hard drive?

McBerns

It happens every time I start up NS2 and go on a server. When it gets to the precache stage, my hard drive makes noises like something is being grinded together. I have two hard drives installed on my PC. So I re-installed the game on a different but quieter hard drive. Same result.

Jekt

Are you sure it doesn't happen during any other read/write intensive operation? Try a search on your entire C:/ drive for example. I would be backing up any files if I were you.

Ghosthree3

Sounds like the hard drive is reading stuff!

Runteh

This can happen as hard drives get older I believe. I have had my laptop for around 6 years, and the hard drive has seen a lot of files come and go due to work. It is probably slowly dying and it occasionally makes a horrible gritty cyper punk sound. Sort of like a dial up modem, but louder and more abrupt.

Mine has been doing this for around two years on occasion, but it is worth have things backed up on a external hard drive. You can get some really nice compact drives for around £60.

xen32

Run SMART check.

Uzver

I usually check hard drive surface with Victoria and by watching a SMART parameter as "number of reallocated bad blocks". After sufrace scan If you get a tons of very slow blocks (takes about some seconds in order to read data instead of some milliseconds) and tons of unreadable blocks - you should replace a disk.
Also these strange sounds may occur if your disk is heavy fragmented.

PimpToad

McBerns wrote: »

It happens every time I start up NS2 and go on a server. When it gets to the precache stage, my hard drive makes noises like something is being grinded together. I have two hard drives installed on my PC. So I re-installed the game on a different but quieter hard drive. Same result.

NS2 is the only game I have installed in my dedicated video game drive (old 10k OEM WD I salvaged) that utterly thrashes it during precache/map loads. It happens pretty randomly, but I can tell NS2 is doing nasty things to it when it starts scratching.

And no it's not an issue with my drive. SMART's all green and the drive is always defragmented so it has no reason whatsoever to thrash around. Already mentioned how NS2 is the only game causing this issue and I suggest you treat it as such.

Loke

Yeah, I have this very same issue. My primary HDD would make these grinding noises like it was under extreme pressure or something. It never does this otherwise, only during the pre-cache stage. I reinstalled the game on my second HDD though since it's a lot quieter and I couldn't stand listening to this noise for 3 agonizing minutes while joining a server.

Roobubba

I can only recommend getting a decent SSD. Yes, they cost money, and no they aren't huge (if you aren't super rich). BUT: the single biggest improvement you can make to any computer is to replace that old HDD and put an SSD in there. I just can't stress enough how much of a difference it makes to any computer, fast pr0 gaming rig or crappy slow old laptop.

Ghosthree3

Roobubba wrote: »

BUT: the single biggest improvement you can make to any computer is to replace that old HDD and put an SSD in there.

Buy 32gb of ram and install ns2 on a ramdisk

EDIT: Tbh 16gb would probably do it.

Uzver

Ghosthree3 wrote: »

Buy 32gb of ram and install ns2 on a ramdisk

EDIT: Tbh 16gb would probably do it.

Reboot your computer and you will lose all data.

Roobubba

Ghosthree3 wrote: »

Roobubba wrote: »

BUT: the single biggest improvement you can make to any computer is to replace that old HDD and put an SSD in there.

Buy 32gb of ram and install ns2 on a ramdisk

EDIT: Tbh 16gb would probably do it.

Even better, save/load the ramdisk from an SSD, then it won't take forever to boot and shut down

Ayanomoose

I get this too. The hard drive is barely a year old. I was worried that it was going to die, but it has been doing it for months and nothing has happened yet. It doesn't always do it though and I've been lazy about moving NS2 over to my SSD.

joshhh

Could be one of two things.
1. Your HDD is dying. Grinding and clicking noises are never a good thing.
2. Your NS2 is inefficiently installed on multiple sectors causing the HDD to work extra hard to load the game. Go Go Gadget disk defrag.
or
3. You need more hamsters one the wheel to power your PC. O_O

kk20

Get an SSD. SSD made a gigantic improvement in all my games. Rest of my system is good but not top of the line (i5 oc 3.8,6850,8gb) and i have zero performance issues in any game at 1080p

meatmachine

RUN A DEFRAG.
Then back all your shit up and get a new HDD

SquishpokePOOPFACE

Put some lube on the spinny part

DC_Darkling

When a harddisk is very busy it can make a grinding noise. As long as this is not a continues sound you probably need not worry.
Check your harddisk drive with some diagnostics & check s.m.a.r.t. values if you want to be sure.

PimpToad

Other than the diagnostics, are you people seriously telling this person to buy something unnecessary to fix an issue that may be inherent with the game itself? You don't need an SSD that will at most let you load a few seconds faster. My buddy has 3 10k drives in a RAID0 setup and he only loads several seconds faster than I do compared to my old 10k drive that's barely faster than modern 5400 drives. Oh and I used to load way faster than him too until UWE finally decided to fix the vsync issue (much rage to be had when his beast rig takes several minutes to precache).

UWE already set the precedent for issues concerning precache/map loads in the past so there's a good chance the problem is on their end in this matter.

Roobubba

PimpToad wrote: »

Other than the diagnostics, are you people seriously telling this person to buy something unnecessary to fix an issue that may be inherent with the game itself? You don't need an SSD that will at most let you load a few seconds faster. My buddy has 3 10k drives in a RAID0 setup and he only loads several seconds faster than I do compared to my old 10k drive that's barely faster than modern 5400 drives. Oh and I used to load way faster than him too until UWE finally decided to fix the vsync issue (much rage to be had when his beast rig takes several minutes to precache).

UWE already set the precedent for issues concerning precache/map loads in the past so there's a good chance the problem is on their end in this matter.

No, but my advice to anyone who doesn't run their os off an ssd is to buy one if they can.
The all round improvement to your computing life is absolutely vast compared with any other consumer upgrade.
The added bonus is that precaching no longer takes much time at all, and also your computer is quieter.

It's a no-brainer of an upgrade to absolutely any device that can support it.

peregrinus

My hard drive sometimes wants to chat about the weather. I find if you give it a disinterested reply the noise tends to go away. Hope that helps.

PimpToad

Roobubba wrote: »

PimpToad wrote: »

Other than the diagnostics, are you people seriously telling this person to buy something unnecessary to fix an issue that may be inherent with the game itself? You don't need an SSD that will at most let you load a few seconds faster. My buddy has 3 10k drives in a RAID0 setup and he only loads several seconds faster than I do compared to my old 10k drive that's barely faster than modern 5400 drives. Oh and I used to load way faster than him too until UWE finally decided to fix the vsync issue (much rage to be had when his beast rig takes several minutes to precache).

UWE already set the precedent for issues concerning precache/map loads in the past so there's a good chance the problem is on their end in this matter.

No, but my advice to anyone who doesn't run their os off an ssd is to buy one if they can.
The all round improvement to your computing life is absolutely vast compared with any other consumer upgrade.
The added bonus is that precaching no longer takes much time at all, and also your computer is quieter.

It's a no-brainer of an upgrade to absolutely any device that can support it.

Yeah great recommend SSD all you like, but that's not really addressing the issue of the OP.

For roughly the same cost one can buy either a 1TB HDD or a 64GB SSD. That's definitely a no-brainer for me!

Roobubba

PimpToad wrote: »

Roobubba wrote: »

PimpToad wrote: »

Other than the diagnostics, are you people seriously telling this person to buy something unnecessary to fix an issue that may be inherent with the game itself? You don't need an SSD that will at most let you load a few seconds faster. My buddy has 3 10k drives in a RAID0 setup and he only loads several seconds faster than I do compared to my old 10k drive that's barely faster than modern 5400 drives. Oh and I used to load way faster than him too until UWE finally decided to fix the vsync issue (much rage to be had when his beast rig takes several minutes to precache).

UWE already set the precedent for issues concerning precache/map loads in the past so there's a good chance the problem is on their end in this matter.

No, but my advice to anyone who doesn't run their os off an ssd is to buy one if they can.
The all round improvement to your computing life is absolutely vast compared with any other consumer upgrade.
The added bonus is that precaching no longer takes much time at all, and also your computer is quieter.

It's a no-brainer of an upgrade to absolutely any device that can support it.

Yeah great recommend SSD all you like, but that's not really addressing the issue of the OP.

For roughly the same cost one can buy either a 1TB HDD or a 64GB SSD. That's definitely a no-brainer for me!

It's my view that every computer should have an ssd. The fact that it would in fact bypass the op's issue entirely while making the entire system so much more responsive is an added bonus. Honestly, if you don't believe the difference it makes to absolutely everything you do on your computer, prepare to have your mind blown when you do eventually get round to using one.

Soylent_green

A hard drive is a mechanical thing and NS2, unlike most games, doesn't batch any of its files into a virtual file system or .wad or anything like that. It reads lots of little tiny textures, material files and props one by one from the drive.

A 1 MB file takes ~10 ms for a hard drive to read. Then it needs to seek and that takes ~5-10 ms and produces an audible click. Most textures and stuff in NS2 is much less than 1 MB; it will spend most of its time seeking.

If the seek noise of your drive is at all audible it should make almost continous clicky/crunchy noises when loading NS2.

Soylent_green

PimpToad wrote: »

For roughly the same cost one can buy either a 1TB HDD or a 64GB SSD. That's definitely a no-brainer for me!

They don't belong on the same level in the cache hierarchy. They are not the same kind of object, any more than RAM prices should be compared to harddrive prices, or the price of L3 cache compared to RAM.

L1(~4 clocks) - L2(~12 clocks) - [L3(~36 clocks)] - RAM[hundreds of clocks] - [SSD(~100k clocks)] - HDD(40 million clocks) - [tape drives(hours!?!)]

An SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can get.

PimpToad

Roobubba wrote: »

PimpToad wrote: »

Roobubba wrote: »

PimpToad wrote: »

Other than the diagnostics, are you people seriously telling this person to buy something unnecessary to fix an issue that may be inherent with the game itself? You don't need an SSD that will at most let you load a few seconds faster. My buddy has 3 10k drives in a RAID0 setup and he only loads several seconds faster than I do compared to my old 10k drive that's barely faster than modern 5400 drives. Oh and I used to load way faster than him too until UWE finally decided to fix the vsync issue (much rage to be had when his beast rig takes several minutes to precache).

UWE already set the precedent for issues concerning precache/map loads in the past so there's a good chance the problem is on their end in this matter.

No, but my advice to anyone who doesn't run their os off an ssd is to buy one if they can.
The all round improvement to your computing life is absolutely vast compared with any other consumer upgrade.
The added bonus is that precaching no longer takes much time at all, and also your computer is quieter.

It's a no-brainer of an upgrade to absolutely any device that can support it.

Yeah great recommend SSD all you like, but that's not really addressing the issue of the OP.

For roughly the same cost one can buy either a 1TB HDD or a 64GB SSD. That's definitely a no-brainer for me!

It's my view that every computer should have an ssd. The fact that it would in fact bypass the op's issue entirely while making the entire system so much more responsive is an added bonus. Honestly, if you don't believe the difference it makes to absolutely everything you do on your computer, prepare to have your mind blown when you do eventually get round to using one.

Your solution involves an unnecessary expenditure on the OP's part for an issue that is most likely caused by UWE. A cursory search on Newegg shows that the cheapest SSD I can purchase with the same capacity as my current HDD costs $155. Seems like a pretty expensive solution for a singular problem don't you think so?

My laptop came with one and yes it loads the OS faster, but my mind was not blown by the difference in comparison to my desktop. I prefer the capacity over (my perceived) negligible performance gains an SSD provides.

Soylent_green wrote: »

PimpToad wrote: »

For roughly the same cost one can buy either a 1TB HDD or a 64GB SSD. That's definitely a no-brainer for me!

They don't belong on the same level in the cache hierarchy. They are not the same kind of object, any more than RAM prices should be compared to harddrive prices, or the price of L3 cache compared to RAM.

L1(~4 clocks) - L2(~12 clocks) - [L3(~36 clocks)] - RAM[hundreds of clocks] - [SSD(~100k clocks)] - HDD(40 million clocks) - [tape drives(hours!?!)]

An SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can get.

I thought we were comparing HDD's and SSD's? I consider the ludicrous cost per GB to be a large factor in my decision to stick with HDD. I do admit that SSD's provide performance gains over standard HDD's, but I won't pay a 900% premium for it.

An SSD may possibly be the single biggest upgrade one can get, but that only applies if your computer is already running top-end parts. Besides it's not like it offers much, if any, performance increase once your game finishes loading.

Kamamura

I also have NS2 and other I/O intensive games in a SSD drive. SSDs have insanely short seek times. You should not think of them as HDD replacements, but as a I/O booster in special cases where it is needed.

Roobubba

PimpToad wrote: »

An SSD may possibly be the single biggest upgrade one can get, but that only applies if your computer is already running top-end parts.

I'm sorry to bang on about this, but honestly this just wrong on all levels. I have a horrendous old laptop. It has a Pentium 4, 1GB ram, and would take ages to do everything. I put a cheap 60GB ssd in there and now it's an awesome living room laptop. everything is responsive, not just loading programs but anything that program does is sped up enormously, if it had anything to do with reading or writing anything.
Older computers actually benefit more than top end rigs (but they still benefit hugely too).

I will grant you that once you've loaded into the game, it won't speed the game up, but loading maps, downloading mods, precaching, etc are all sped up immensely

DC_Darkling

Not answering the OPs question with this one but yes, a SSD is a solid performance upgrade on even a very old rig.

Problem with ssd however is limited size. A ssd per GB is a lot more expensive then a normal drive.
Also cheaper ssd tend to be 'slower' then there more large (246 or 512 or higher) relatives.
SSDs new tech also is a bit of a grey area. The ssd controller is one of the big influences on performance & stability and most of the ssd are below expectations on that. (I would definately readup folk, it does matter. Controller is the most important part of a good ssd)
Also SSDs perform worse over time in a non trim setup. Older computers may lack trim.

Soylent_green

DC_Darkling wrote: »

Problem with ssd however is limited size. A ssd per GB is a lot more expensive then a normal drive.

A problem with RAM is it's limited size. RAM per GB is a lot more expensive than a normal SSD.


Makes about as much sense. SSDs are mid-way between RAM And HDDs; the only reason you think of them as storage is the impermanence of RAM(this too may change in the not too distance future).

DC_Darkling

No you simply misunderstood me as I didnt talk anything about ram.

a low GB ssd has less speed then a version of the same model with more GB.
While its still godly fast compared to a normal disk, a 60GB ssd for example, is in the ssd world very slow.