Should I worry?

I noticed when im playing back a session thats in my external hardrive, the external hd is making a small grinding noise. For example lets say I have a 4 bar drum loop on track 1 thats been repeated about 20 times. Everytime the playback curser goes to the next loop it'll make that grinding noise. If I were too consolidate the track by making all 20 regions into just one region the griding would stop. I use my external hd for everything, not only Pro Tools Sessions. And I dont have any software to defrag my drives. And I never run any other programs while running Pro Tools. SHould I worry about this? Or is this normal?

If that external FW drive is your only drive, I should worry! I don't know if the noises you're hearing are unusual or abnormal, but you should have any precious data backed up to at least one other drive. Hard drives do go bad and it's an old law, or charter, or something, that it will go bad at the worst possible moment. Back up your data, and then you won't have to worry. Until then, be afraid. Be very afraid. Do you have enough room on your PB's internal drive to make a backup? If not, get yourself another external drive pronto, then you'll be able to sleep at night. Hope that wasn't too dramatic, but it's dead important to have the backup. BTW, defragging in OS X is a debatable issue! Personally I never do it. If necessary I back-up to another drive, initialise the offending article, and restore the back-up to what's now a fresh surface. Hope this helped.

Right now I really dont have the money to purchase another external drive. Is it possible to save a session on a Data Disc or CDR, till I get money to purchase another drive? I understand that "ANYTHING" can happen and my data will be lost if that drive goes out. BTW thanks for your reply.

Yeah, of course you can burn it to a CD, as long as it's <650MB or so. How big is the session you want to back up? How much space do you have on your PB's internal drive? What kind of optical drive do you have in the PB? Can you burn DVD's? Too many questions. If you can back-up the session and all it's associated files to your internal drive then do it now, then figure out how you're gonna burn it to a disk. As long as you have enough space on the internal drive to keep a backup of your current project until it's finished, burn the hard copy, wipe the slate and start the next project, no reason to get another external drive except convenience. Or, run with the guys who've never had a drive fail. Sure, it's rare, but ask yourself yourself the question "do I feel lucky?". Well, do you?

Of course you should be prepared for a drive failure, but the behavior you're noticing may also just be the normal sound of your drive seeking. Only you can tell if it has changed over time.

Thanks Guys for your help. Backing Up a current session to my Internal, and backing up the older ones to a Disc is a great idea. Maybe the noise im hearing is normal because I only hear it when I have "ALOT" of edits/fades on a session. Other than that I never hear it. BTW I got a Superdrive on my Powerbook. So should I burn the older sessions on CDR/DATA/ or DVD? Does it matter? And thanks again for your help.

Sound plan Communist, and now you have it backed up you can say "What? Me worry?" The noises from your FW drive may be or not be normal, but now you don't care. Glad to be of help; peace of mind's priceless, backup's cheap.