Okay, so here's a quick rundown of what I'm experiencing.
Issue: Hard drive in Windows 7 64-bit is going completely crazy. Lots of clicking and clanking. Takes forever to load anything, and sometimes it just flat out throws up a BSOD and that's pretty much all she wrote. The system was originally on Windows 8.1 64-bit when this issue started. There was a 1TB SATA drive that began the clicking and clanking, which led me to believe the HDD was about to combust. Well, I snagged a different HDD. I put a new 500GB HDD in the system and figured I would go back to Windows 7 64-bit. So I did. Within a couple hours of getting all of my programs reinstalled, the clicking and clanking began again.
What I've Done: Updated motherboard BIOS. Installed SATA controller drivers (In Win8 and Win7). Fiddled with CMOS settings (things like eXtreme HDD, whatever that is, and SATA mode, AHCI, IDE, etc). I've changed SATA cables. I've changed SATA ports. I've reset the CMOS (many many times).
As I type this, the 500GB HDD is making god awful noises as if the reader head is smacking against the drive casing. I'm at a loss. I've googled and I've googled, but apparently nobody else is having an issue like mine. I'm reaching out and hoping someone can shine some light on this situation. I can't afford to lose my computer since I need it to work from home. What am I missing? Event Viewer in Win8 was throwing up an error along the lines of JRAID Disk0/1/2 not responding, so it shut the disk down. Win7 has no such issues with this new drive, but I'm still getting the same exact issues: loud HDD noises, extremely slow loading, and programs just timing out completely. I don't recall changing anything back in Windows 8.1 to cause this, and considering I've switched HDDs completely, I'm drawing a blank.
Posts
Do you have software RAID or hardware? If it's hardware, it could be that the RAID controller itself is screwed up and doing something terrible to your drives. Try completely disabling it.
Multiple hard drive failures could also indicate (in descending order of likeliness):
1. Bad power supply (or possibly just the terminal the drives were on)
2. Motherboard failure (drive interface)
3. Environmental factors (heat, dust)
1-2 should be immediate, 3 could show up after days or weeks - a few hours seems too quick, unless things are really awful in there.
Most Hard drive companies offer advanced RMA where you just provide them the SN and a credit card and then they send you a new hard drive, you pack up the old hard drive in the box they send you and you send it back. Usually the fastest method to getting a replacement. They will put a hold on the credit card until they receive the defective drive.
My recommendation is to replace the HD again, send the 1TB and 500GB HD's back for warranty replacement.
2 is just extremely rare, 3 just shouldn't happen with a good drive quickly unless you are being downright abusive to the drive.