hard drive questionFollow

Well, it's either a fan, which is most likely, or its the bearing starting to go in the drive, in which case it should have shown up as a spinup issue under seatools. if the drive is on the smaller side and you don't have a backup in place, i'd replace it anyways with a larger one since drives are cheap. It's probably dust in the video card fan though. the reason that grinding would go away upon entering ffxiv is that once the fan kicks into higher revolution mode the bearing drag you are hearing as grinding goes away because the fan itself is spinning too fast. It's like the old card in the bicycle spokes trick.

its a seagate barracuda 250 gb 7200 rpm HDD btw, i just recently dusted out my pc too like a week ago so i know its not any of the fans. i notice no errors in my pc either other then that sound while idle its running fine

Edited, Apr 16th 2011 5:31pm by shady113

well found a vid that sounds very similar to what mine is making vid comments say its fine but idk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9obzgmWrlM

If you have access to it, do you have a sata power adapter at all? You could pull your drive and let it just sit idle on the table or something so you can actually see if it is indeed the drive itself that is making the noise.

I would try to pinpoint exactly what is making the noise before you make any other decisions on what to do to remedy the issue.