horrible clicking sound from a laptop harddrive

[jhu]

this just started 2 days ago. every so often, when the hard drive is accessed, there's this really loud clicking noise. it's not just the usual quiet clicking when the hard drive is being accessed. i thought the drive might be failing. but so far the computer works just fine, other than the clicking noises. the drive's smart electronics don't flag anything out of the ordinary. i ran the built-in bios hard drive diagnostics and that came up with nothing also. anythoughts?

 

[bsobel]

Replace it, backup NOW

 

[MadAmos]

Don't keep trying the next time may be the last as Bsobel says get a new drive ASAP. If you don't have current backups' any files you don't want to loose should be copied now to a usb drive a cd, dvd whatever you have. Don't wait until it quits completely as it will get a lot more expensive/harder soon.

 

[jhu]

already backed up everything last night. still no issues other than the loud clicking sounds. wouldn't smart have picked up anything wrong or does it only notify with bad sectors and not mechanical failure?

 

[Denithor]

Hard drives are BAD at notifying you when they're preparing to die. As in, they almost never will. That clicking signals something's not right in there. Now, that said, I've seen drives that ran fine with clicking for more than a year before finally failing (but when they did fail, it was complete & without any additional warning). So you've got two options: maintain a running backup of your important stuff while continuing to use that drive or replace it. Maybe with an SSD this time?

 

[SLORider]

Sheesh! For the price of a drive, just replace it! What--two or three tanks of gas? I had a laptop brought to me that wouldn't boot because the drive was banging the head back-and-forth trying. After about 50 attempts, it booted! Immediately backed-up and trashed it.

 

[Nerg]

Man, you are so lucky you were able to back it up. Did you do anything specific to backup?
I have the same problem and seems like I need to pay crazy money to recover data from it...
Here are by the way some typical sounds these things make: http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php
Mine's there

 

[cliffa3]

When it makes any kind of loud noise, backup immediately (before you turn it off).

Glad you were able to save your data.

My failure indications always sounded like a marble dropping on a glass table...took one of them apart (casing only, left all electronics intact) and powered it up. That sound is the R/W head slamming hard to the middle of the disk...only a matter of time before it gets stuck there. Unfortunately that's a mechanical failure and not a corrupt disk, but SSD's are on the way to save us from that.

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: cliffa3
...but SSD's are on the way to save us from that.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Denithor

Originally posted by: cliffa3
...but SSD's are on the way to save us from that.

Yeah, with SSD , you get no warning at all, just your data corrupted. Still hard drives can die without warning too.

To the OP
Basically, back up anything you can't recover every time you save it.
If the drive makes noise that it didn't make before, time to replace.

 

[jhu]

well, i bought a replacement hard drive at fry's. i was afraid the hp recovery discs wouldn't work with a replacement drive; fortunately i was wrong. and now comes the arduous process of decrappifying the factory install. this is day 2 and i'm still not done yet...

 

[taltamir]

Yeah, with SSD , you get no warning at all, just your data corrupted. Still hard drives can die without warning too.

More like, with SSD you get no warning at all, they just don't fail. Clicking = motor failure imminent. an SSD does not have a motor to fail. When was the last time your RAM or CPU died? That is how often SSD drives would die on you. no wait, less often, because SSD are using less electricity and running a lot cooler. (at room temp to be precise)

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Yeah, with SSD , you get no warning at all, just your data corrupted. Still hard drives can die without warning too.

More like, with SSD you get no warning at all, they just don't fail. Clicking = motor failure imminent. an SSD does not have a motor to fail. When was the last time your RAM or CPU died? That is how often SSD drives would die on you. no wait, less often, because SSD are using less electricity and running a lot cooler. (at room temp to be precise)

SSD do fail. The very process they use to record information assures they have a limited lifespan. Anything made can fail and SSD by their nature are not likely to give any warning that they are failing other than corrupt data.


SSD have little in common with CPU or Dram except that they both use electricity.

 

[faxon]

actually, SSDs have built in smart features which monitor how many runs they have left on their write cycles (specifically the intel ones, idk about the others). if your drive is about to die there is a built in feature which they can actually use to bring up a notice in windows which will tell you your disk is about to hit the end of their write cycle lifetime. as for the drive becoming corrupted, it WONT, because the way a SSD dies is, the chips themselves dont fail, you just can no longer write to the drive. you CAN however still read from the drive, making recovering the drive as simple as just reading all the data off of it. im not sure though, but i think you may only be able to read the data once! so as soon as it warns you the drive is going to fail you back up the data.

 

[Nerg]

You were lucky it didn't die all of a sudden...

 

[AmongthechosenX]

what you will notice, OP, is that eventually common operations such as opening internet explorer or word will take literally 5 or 6 times longer than it normally would. once you start getting there, its on its way out.

 

[cliffa3]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Yeah, with SSD , you get no warning at all, just your data corrupted. Still hard drives can die without warning too.

...

SSD do fail. The very process they use to record information assures they have a limited lifespan. Anything made can fail and SSD by their nature are not likely to give any warning that they are failing other than corrupt data.

Talk about spreading some crap around. Would you mind reading this page of the Intel X25-M SSD? Then come back and try to tell me I get no warning at all and it's just corrupted. I'm sure there are some poor implementations out there that might just fail with no warning, but do your research and buy a well designed drive and you'll be fine.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=5

The previous page also has some required reading before you go on about how they might fail suddenly and perhaps quickly:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4

It states that Intel predicts it will be able to write far beyond 100GB per day for five years.

SSDs that are on the way will last far beyond the mechanical, electric, or magnectic expectancy of today's drives. With coming software (see same referenced article), they will also be able to let you check in on them and see how much life they predict they have left, and will notify you if you may soon need to consider replacing them.