What's going on with my USB drive?

I have a WD MyBook 2tb drive, one of several on my Mac Mini running Mountain Lion, and a few days ago that drive started making scritchy-scratchy sounds like it was being worked really hard when nothing at all was accessing it. That the drive access light isn`t flashing while this is going on is all the more puzzling.
So it has to be the OS doing something on it I would think, and doing a lot of it for some reason or another, but I have no clue how to find out what, or why. Okay, so the disk could be failing, and I`ve got it all backed up so if it goes I just go buy another disk, but this disk is less than a year old, and I have a WD 500gb disk that`s nearly 7 years old and it`s still going strong. Then too, I`ve run Disk Utility on it several times and it give the drive a clean bill of health, so WHAT????
I`ve tried using Terminal to find out what`s going on with that disk, but being a total idiot when it comes to Unix I`ve little idea how to look at that particular disk, and try as I might I cannot find anything online anywhere that tells me how.
So far I`ve tried iosnoop, which gets me a lot of seemingly bad messages that scroll endlessly up the screen saying things like:
dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 4 (ID 1031: io:mach_kernel:buf_strategy:start): invalid user access in action #3 at DIF offset 0
and this launchd stuff:
launchd ??/<unknown (NULL v_parent)>/<unknown (NULL v_name)>
This stuff just goes on and on and on and on... forever and never stops.
What does it all mean???? Is the drive dying on me? What if I reformat it? Would this stuff stop?

Is this a one-time occurence, or is it continuous?
Does the drive have a separate power source or is it bus powered by the Mini?

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I purchased my macbook in Feb 2007. I've had two 160GB macbook hard drives corrupted (beyond any data retrieval) since then (and in the last year). I lost a great deal of PhD Thesis the first time.
Both times i had the screen freeze (unrelated to power since both were fully charged) and when I rebooted the HD could not be accessed. Seems to be corrupting the category B-tree in the catalogue. I have no idea what this means except i have no love for the B-tree. Off to mac repairers. Apple will not replace your HD without the old one which does create dramas when your old one is at data recovery.
I've learnt my external hard drive lesson (but always remember to back up your iTunes and iPhotos) since then but what's a reasonable expectation for your macbook to corrupt it's hard drive? Each HD took exactly 8 months to corrupt. coincidence? unlikely.
I have extra applecare protection cover but apple seem to think it's reasonable to replace the hard drive again and won't replace the macbook. I'm don't think that living in fear for the next 8 months is an appropriate resolution?
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There have been some reports of a couple of runs of bad drives from the drive manufacturers, most reports being of Seagate drives, but I've seen nothing confirmed by any of the manufacturers. But all laptop manufacturers get their drives from the same vendors, so any vendor is equally likely to have a problem in such a circumstance. It's possible that your replacement drive was of the same series and so had the same problem, if such a problem really does exists. But laptop drives, being of very tiny parts, are more susceptible to failure; they're just not as robust as desktop drives, and of course are subject to more shock from travel. In my experience, support hundreds of laptops from various vendors, MacBooks are no more prone to hard drive failure than are any other manufacturer's system. So it could well have just been bad luck (presuming that the problem was indeed a hardware failure).
As to replacement, it's quite reasonable for Apple to just replace the hard drive again in the case of another failure, as there is really nothing in such a circumstance that would make replacing the entire MacBook help the situation.
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Regards.

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Hi, all.
Two days ago I was using my computer, a 2011 Macbook Pro, and suddenly got the error message reading "Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory. To avoid problems with your computer, quit any applications you are not using. Closing windows and removing files from your startup disk will also help."
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Regarding the USB, see if zapping the PRAM helps.
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WhatSize (SHAREWARE)
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GrandPerspective (FREE - donation)
Mac Performance Guide
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===============
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO-mlLApEuk

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You should also update your OS to 10.7.5 if your profile reading of 10.7.2 is correct. Won't help speed, but will be more reliable -> http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1582.
Clinton

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zihsuan wrote:
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