Diagnosis? Dying HD?

By Oli on Friday, 14th March 2008. More information. Comments.

Possibly the worst noise that you can expect to hear as a user of a computer: a HD in the process of kicking the bucket.

Listen to this:

My gut feeling is a HD on the way out but I tried each of them while it was still running and everything was as quick as ever (I think). I restarted and took the side of the case off but there's no noise anymore...

Odd...

Written by Oli on Friday, 14 March 2008. Tagged with hardware. Read 1118 times. If you liked it, please give it a digg.

#1 /* 7 months, 0 days ago */

*shudder* Yes, any PC noise that's out of the ordinary makes me wince a bit. That sounds awfully loud for a hard-drive, though... perhaps a cable got too close to a fan and kept getting nicked?

Either way, I'd pick up a replacement hard-drive and use your current one for non-essential things. With the cost of new, high capacity hard-drives, it's too easy to get a new one and avoid the risk!

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Jacob Hume Anonymous User

#2 /* 6 months, 29 days ago */

If the bearings are bad, it'll whine kind of high-pitched when it spins up.
If you've got the click of death (bad read/write head actuator), it'll tick quickly when it tries to access the HD. Try doing something HDD intensive, and then running it without the HDD. If it clicks way louder when using the HDD, you may want to start backing everything up en-masse. A good way to test this sort of thing is to get a Linux Live CD, unplug the hard drives, and boot it up. If you still hear clicking, it probably isn't the HDD.

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