Noisy harddrive

My harddrive is making quite a bit of noise. It's never been dropped or anything like that so I'm kinda confused. The grinding ish sound comes and goes. How can I troubleshoot this issue? I have a 1tb Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm drive.

My harddrive is making quite a bit of noise. It's never been dropped or anything like that so I'm kinda confused. The grinding ish sound comes and goes. How can I troubleshoot this issue? I have a 1tb Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm drive.

Serial-No_3404

When you say "Grinding sound" is this more of an actual grinding sound... as if metal was being placed up against a saw? or more like repetative clicking/tapping?

I recommend backing up all of your data on another drive for security puroses and assuming you are using windows. Press windows key ( or start button ) and type in search "CMD" Right click CMD and "Run as administrator" for XP just go to start > run > type "CMD" hit enter > ( read further below for further instructions )

Now depending on how many partitions you have type chkdsk C: /r /f ( for example ) C: being the drive, do this for every partition letter on that drive. Type "Y" and enter for checking the operating system disk then restart your system.

Regardless the thing about loud hard drives is... they either last a very long time ( with the possibility of reduced performance ) or they begin getting bad sectors and you start losing data. Also make sure the volume is defragmented.

You can also test the hard drive life with various tools but I am at work so I don't have any links to provide. Just keep in mind any drive 1TB and up drives are still newer technology and have a high failure rate.

If the hard drive has always had that sound, then you are more than likely okay. If you're not happy with it, get a refund/exchange if the sound bothers you.

If the drive has recently been making those noises when its never done so, its usually a sign of imminent drive failure. I suggest you backup anything thats important.

All hard drives make noise when accessing data.

Whether it's a problem or not depends on the exact noise.

It's a new computer, I build it like 3 or 4 weeks ago. I recently moved it to sit on my desk so I might just not have noticed it before when it was on the floor by my desk. I moved to a different room that's smaller so the desk was the only place I have space for it. It sounds like a tattoo machine at work.Serial-No_3404