HDD dying?

[Temsen]

Hello everyone,
about a week or two ago I started noticing some weird sounds coming from my PC, barely audible, somewhat high-pitched scratching/whistling sounds, (it's really hard to describe, like a fan that needs some oil or something) coming at random intervals.
Now, since yesterday I'm pretty sure it's my HDD (500GB Samsung 502IJ) as the sounds are basically coming whenever I do anything, be it opening folders/files, or even just hovering above links in my browser.
I installed Acronis Drive Monitor to see if that can give me some insight nut it lists every S.M.A.R.T parameter as OK.
Do I need to worry or can I trust the program/find another way of checking my HDD?

In the case of it possibly dying, I though about buying a SSD, installing windows on that one and use my HDD as a secondary drive, would there by any problems with having windows installed on both of them? (I'd unplug the HDD for the installation on the SSD of course)
Also, I have an external drive that I usually run via E-SATA, however as AHCI wasn't enabled when windows was installed (and my attempts to enable it afterwards were in vain) I always need to shut down my PC to plug it in. If I activated AHCI before installing windows I should be able to use E-SATA via plug&play with the PC running, right?

[Janaa]

SMART is hit and miss, as it looks for specific indicators. A drive can have mechanical issues and SMART might not pick it up at all.

There shouldn't be an issue having Windows on both, as long as the drive you want to boot to is set as the first drive in BIOS (and ideally, put on the first channel). But still, remove Windows from the dodgy drive as soon as you can (ie, if it's dying, get your data you want off it and format it and just use it for games or something - nothing longterm).

[Temsen]

Meh, so there is no reliable way of checking I guess?
Also, still curious about those E-SATA issues. D:

[Realist Phill]

SMART is hit and miss, as it looks for specific indicators. A drive can have mechanical issues and SMART might not pick it up at all.

There shouldn't be an issue having Windows on both, as long as the drive you want to boot to is set as the first drive in BIOS (and ideally, put on the first channel). But still, remove Windows from the dodgy drive as soon as you can (ie, if it's dying, get your data you want off it and format it and just use it for games or something - nothing longterm).

What she said.

[Deleted]

well you can use a program called HD tune ( I'm sure there are more similar programs ) to test the drive . other than smart values that you have already seen you can test the drive speeds, and compare it to other results ( on the webby there are some ) to see if you can actually see it degrading.

Some ppl told be about http://www.harddisksentinel.com/ being great @ detecting hd failures , I never tested it.

But I would do what Janaa said , move everything important to the other drive until you figure this out .. or it dies :/

Once I had a similar problem with a friends pcs ( This may be completely unrelated ) with another samsung drive while we were experimenting with Automatic acoustic management (AAM) on ATA drives. We though it was a signal of HDD degradation and it was the AAM setted on 0.

You can always try to get a samsung tool called "Samsung Drive Diagnostic Utility (Hutil)" and use it to test the drive.