Hard Drive Failing?

[VirusType2]

Hey, my one of my hard drives started making a funny noise, but then stopped and isn't doing it anymore. It didn't sound terrible, but was like a noisy seeking sound.

Does that mean it's going to die any minute or in the next couple weeks or what?

I haven't had a hard drive failure before so I don't know what to expect.

 

[tesher06]

Umm were you loading any huge files, cds or such? I recommend you make a backup of your hardrive.

 

[Qonfused]

Back up everything you NEED to keep (documents, etc.) immediately. I recently had a HDD die on me suddenly and lost everything. Shit really sucks.

Was it a clicking noise?

 

[Asus]

Usually when a hard drive is telling you it is dying it does the clicking but also you get some kind of other feedback from the system. Windows delayed write errors or system partially freezing etc.

A drive can also make noises when it is perfectly fine.

Backing up key files is always good if you think something might be not right.

 

[Qonfused]

For me, it was almost instant. I was playing a game with some people in Ventrilo. My harddrive started clicking. Within seconds the game froze, but oddly enough I could still talk to people in Vent (I was actually letting them hear the sound my HDD was making). The computer wouldn't boot into the OS after a hard restart.

 

[VirusType2]

Thank you for the quick and useful replies.

I was downloading something and it just started making a mild noise. I thought it was one of my fans. I stuck my ear up to it and it sounded like a hard drive working. And indeed it was working, I was downloading. So I stopped the download but the sound continued. I figured it is my old drive that I've been heavily using for the couple years I've had it.

I opened up device manager to disable the drives one by one (rebooting if necessary) to see if I could figure out which one it was for sure, but when I opened the 'disk drives' pane to select a drive to disable, the sound stopped. To see if it was the download causing the noise, I started it back up and this time there was no sound.

EDIT: There was no indication that there was a problem other than the sound that went on for about a minute. There were no Windows errors or anything. The drive appears to be working fine.

It sounded like it was doing the same thing over and over. So that could be mechanical failure or a software error maybe. I don't know if it was an unusual procedure, but it was an unusual noise.

I was planning on upgrading it anyway. I read on some forum not to turn off the drive because it might not start up again. So I plan on leaving the computer on while I back it up. :shrug: Honestly, this drive has been a beast and - while I really don't want to lose 500GB of data - and I don't know that much about failing drives, I'm feeling pretty confident that it will be fine for quite a while if I were to continue to use it indefinitely. But I will be replacing it within a day or two.

Provided it still works for a little while, I think I could use this to back up non-critical files. I mean how long can a hard drive store data for if it's only 2 years old? 15-20 years?

 

[Rico]

It depends on what happened to it, if anything.

Did you check any background processes in task manager?

The only reason I could think of your HD making any noise that would be alarming would be Head Crash

Head Crash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash


But if you're truly worried then back up your files and demote it to a backup drive.