Hard Drive Noise

Sniper

Sniper

Administrator
Staff member
Recently (a month) I bought a new Maxtor 40GB HD, and just a few days ago it just stoped working :( It didnt use to make any noise when running. When I went it to disk management in XP for the drive status it only said 'healty' for the main partion for the others i didnt. I turned on SMART DISK and it gave a warnning.

now that i have a replacement its a seagate 40GB, now this drive makes a noise, just like my old, old 4GB hard drive :)

so if it makes that clicking type noise does it mean its healthy...
as now in disk management it displays healthy for all partions.

luckly i had a back up of all the files from the previous day. So nothing was lost.
 
Different drives make different noises, I've had some really quiet old drives and some really noisy new ones. I've always found the best method of keeping tabs on a hard drive is to run scan disk regularly.
 
thanks for the info Pinki, its just before I just had to listen to the fan and now its the hard drive also :(
 
My cure for that is too crack up the volume on the stereo, can't hear nothing but sweet music then :D
 
Just because you can hear it doesn't mean they're bad. My Maxtors are extremely quite, and I can hear my IBM 60GXP's a little, but both are working great. A WD drive I had was sorta loud, but It's never failed me.
 
true :) you should have smartdisk enabled to give you a warning if your hard drive is in danger of failing. you can enable this feature through the BIOS menu...
 
Well, it really depends. The typical "grinding" noise it ok. In this I mean the noise a drive makes when it's seeking, reading or writing. The not good noise is the clanking a drive makes when it's head has to go back to chs 0. In doing this the drive is starting over since it's losing it place. The clanking sound heard here is a usually a sharp sound. It's the head's servo hitting, not the head itself. However, it's still not a good sign as the head is losing it's place and has to start over from chs 0. It's more of a steady click..click...click...click sound. If this is the case and your getting sudden lock up's, intermitant freezes, then everything appears to be fine, then a sudden freeze for a few seconds, the drive may be needing replacement. Hard to tell though.
 
If the HDD makes a ter-tick..ter-tick noise all the time when starting up the machine then, it's a head crash. In which case I hope you still have your backup :swt:

If not then there's no real way to tell if it's on the way out.
And 'HDD smart' in BIOS will slow down the access rate of the HDD, so I don't bother.
 
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