I have a 40 gigabyte hardrive which seems to make strange scratch type of noises sometimes.

Should I be concerned?

Maker of the drive is called Maxtor (pretty sure that's the name)

Nope, it's normal for hard drives to make noises when they are spinning (and you should see the hard drive light go on as well). Actually I had a computer that had a maxtor drive... I'm not sure if it was 40GB or 80GB but it did make noises when accessing large files and so on. Especially while defragmentation and checking for spyware..

But although there isn't a problem you should always run chkdisk and defragment it. I recommend power defragmenter. And always make back up's (especially if your drive is 2 or 3 years old)

Maxtor drives are reasonably reliable, i currently have 4 installed, and i haven't had a failure on any of them (the oldest more than 7yrs old). A drive can make noise due to excessive fragmentation, thus it requires more sectors of the drive to be read in different areas of the drive. Also if the drive runs at a different speed than another drive you may be running, i have found that windows can demand information faster than the slow drive can supply it, so it gets behind, and works harder/faster, thus you start to hear the spinning more often.
(Not so common, but screws can come loose, it could be the spinning of the drive is also causing a phyiscal noise against your hard drive bay inside your case, these screws can be tightened [only snug tight] with any non magnetic screwdriver)

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