Table of Contents
This article will show you how To Identify Failing Hard Drive Noise. This piece tells you about the sounds your external hard drive might make and what those sounds mean about the drive’s activity and health. Today, a lot of people keep personal information on the hard drive of their computer. But each hard drive has its own life expectancy and can fail.
And if your hard drive fails, you could lose your files. This piece will show you a list of signs that your hard drive is about to fail and tell you what you should do to protect yourself. After just three years, the rate at which hard drives and SSDs fail goes up dramatically. Changes in temperature, humidity, or shocks from the outside can make it happen faster.
After three to five years, you should start looking for answers if you notice early signs of a hard drive failing, such as slower performance, a growing number of bad sectors, or even strange noises. You can also go to the official Microsoft support site to know more information.
How To Identify Failing Hard Drive Noise
Normal Noises
When your computer starts up, works, or shuts down, you will hear noises. Most of the time, all of them are normal, as follows:
- When your computer boots up, its internal hard drive will also starts to spin up. At this time, you will surely hear some whirring sounds. It is because that the drive will get up from idle to full speed, getting into normal functions.
- In addition, when the hard drive works, you may hear some irregular clicking sounds occurring at 4 or 5 second intervals. Such sounds are normal as the drive heads are moving back and forth across the platters.
- Moreover, when you shut down your computer or it is entering sleep mode, it is possible that you will hear drive clicking as well. But it is normal in that it refers to that the drive heads are parking for standby.
Abnormal Noises
On the other hand, a failing hard drive usually makes strange noises and does strange things on your computer, such as:
- Your computer system freezes or crashes.
- System cannot boot up as normal.
- Your computer hard drive cannot be recognized by the BIOS.
If your PC has any of these problems and you hear any of the following strange sounds, you can be sure that your hard drive is failing.
- If you hear repeated regular tapping or clicking sounds, chances are that the hard drive may be meeting up with a head crash.
- Also, the grinding or scratching sounds are more frightening as it means that the motor bearings fail and drive heads are scraping the surface of the drive platters. Both of them can be destructive.
- What’s more, at times, you may hear vibration sounds which can come from either the normal vibration in the mounting hardware or a hard drive failure.
FAQs
The most common signs of a failing hard drive are a computer that gets too hot, makes strange noises (like clicking or spinning), and loses data or files. The signs of a failing hard drive can quickly lead to big problems, so you should act right away to save your files and avoid losing any data.
The heads of the HDD, which read and write data, are always moving quickly. During use, this usually sounds like a soft click here and there, but it can sound like a hard click when the heads stop moving, like when the computer shuts down or goes to sleep mode.