They say prevention is better than cure so if your computer’s hard disk is making some strange clicking sounds, it’s probably time to backup data because noises are often symptoms of a failing hard drive.
Now not all sounds coming from the computer may be signs of trouble (for instance the culprit could be noisy fan and not the disk) so how you distinguish noises specific to the hard drive?
Data Cent, a data recovery firm who probably know more about noisy hard drive than anyone else, has created a useful resource with sounds from hard drives of different manufactures and what these sounds indicate.
I had some trouble loading the MP3 at the time of writing but there’s another similar but more general resource here – just hover the mouse over the kind of noise you hear and it will display the possible cause with the sound.
You can also download this zip file (courtesy drivesavers.com) containing four different sounds that indicate a troubled Hard Disk.
Related: Recover Data from Damaged CDs
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/strange-clicking-sound-in-hard-drive/5377/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
These sounds are very helpful for normal users to indicate your harddisk is going to dead sooner or later and backing up of their data will be useful for them ,with the help of these sounds users can sense symptoms of harddrvie failing .Thanks amit.
Written by venkat on 11.12.08
Long before my hard disk made similar sound, but then I was programming in assembly and too much experimentation might have overwritten some OS code segment, then the hard disk was rendered useless.
Good to see some solutions for that, too late though..
Written by Prasanna S on 11.12.08
The Data Cent page with the sound file “has received more than a million hits” in the past 24 hours and been removed as a temporary measure:-)
I get the occasional click from my secondary Seagate hard drive but it doesn’t sound like any of the sounds on the ecodatrecovery.com site:-(
Written by cherian on 11.12.08
At the moment of writing this comment I’m downgrading my friends Dell 1525 to XP, and its making these small clicking noises, thou its not bad as the samples in flash widget. I think I should do the job and return the notebook asap.. coz I don’t want the blame on me … eek
Written by Supreet on 11.14.08