max101 Posted March 28, 2006 Posted March 28, 2006 Hello everyone, Depending on the day, it can make a wheezing sound or be dead quiet. It used to click somewhat quietly, now it doesn't click at all. Most of the time it's quiet, but supposedly if it does wheeze adn click a bit it's because it's recalibrating itself. Does anyone know more about this? I've looked online and all that sites say is that "clicking = bad", but it's not similar to the clicking I had with the hard-drive that failed on my older computer. Thanks in advance! Quote
TCH-Don Posted March 28, 2006 Posted March 28, 2006 Welcome to the forums I hope you have backed all important data. This happened to me, just before the drive went. Might not be your case, but I would still make backups soon. Quote
TCH-JimE Posted March 28, 2006 Posted March 28, 2006 Hello, My hard drive makes all kinds of sounds at times and once I could only use one hard drive if it was a 45 degree angle. Your right though, making noises is normally a sound of it starting to go, but my noisey one in my otherwise silent Shuttle cube has been like it for the last 5 years, so you never know! Also, make sure all the screws holding it in are tight, if you have one loose and its spins at a certain noise, it will rattle a bit. (its hard to describe noises i know!) JimE Quote
stevevan Posted March 28, 2006 Posted March 28, 2006 Not sure if this may help, but Seagate drives are notorious for making a lot of racket...at least all the ones I've heard are! And I would take Don's advice and make backups of important data right away just in case! Quote
Madmanmcp Posted March 28, 2006 Posted March 28, 2006 The Hard drive is a very complicated mechanical device. Its made of metal and plastic and has lots of moving parts. All these moving parts are going to make noises, sometimes these noises are good and sometimes they are bad. Basically the drive "heads" and the arms that move these heads across the platters are what make the most noise. The heads need to move back and forth at high speeds to read different location trying to find the correct data to read from the drive. This movement is what causes most of the clicking. Here is a picture of the inside of a drive showing the heads, arms, and the platter. h_tp://internal.vusd.solanocoe.k12.ca.us/buck/pc_tech/study/hdd.htm#MODERN Now trying to tell from a description of sounds whether a drive is good or bad or going bad is impossible. So like the others suggested, take a backup and keep it updated just in case. Drives do go bad...or they can last a long time, but its better to be prepared Quote
Madmanmcp Posted March 28, 2006 Posted March 28, 2006 Depending on the day, it can make a wheezing sound or be dead quiet. This is probably the operating system. Windows has a "feature" called a "swap file" which is used to give the computer more virtual memory. The disk is used to store temporary data instead of RAM. The way this works is data is written to the disk (cached) for easy retrieval and is kept for a length of time. During idle periods the computer will clean out the older data from the swap file and move things around making the data that is used more often easier and quicker to access. So your computer may be unused at the moment but you will see the hard drive light flashing and the drive will be making noises as if its working on something...it is. Once this process is done the drive will become quite again, until it needs to swap around the data again. Quote
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