ive checked my hard drives with the speedfan S.M.A.R.T. prog and they both checked out as good (all green) but one of them is making a quiet grinding noise only when searching the web. ive not noticed this before could the SMART prog be wrong and its time to replace the drive
If it's the same noise that the drive makes when it's opening a large file for the first time off that drive, and if it's the same drive your swap (page) file is on then your computer is swapping the contents of your RAM into virtual memory. Which would suggest you are running out of RAM