My hard disk has 24 Raw Read Error Rate from the SMART value obtained from SpeedFan.

Is this a sign of bad sectors in my HDD. When I used CHKDSK to scan my partition, sometimes there errors and sometimes windows will just say that it has finished checking without any probs.

My hard disk seems to produce a grinding kind of sound at times. When that happens, my Firefox will get locked up for 3-5 seconds that return to normal again. My windows explorer also seems to slow down/lag when that happens.

Is it a sign of a dying HDD? My hard disk is only about 2 years old.
When I perform like disk scan on my hard disk, the performance will deteriorate even further. While performing the scan, the grinding noises get more frequent and my Firefox tends to lock up more while browsing.

The grinding sound is the kind of sound when the hard disk is seeking stuff from the drive but its continuous and really loud too.

This post has been edited by raptor_cZn: Nov 7 2008, 08:33 PM

Found out that the problem had something to do with Firefox 3 reading and writing too much to the disk cache.