loud hard disk drive

[Squawk7777]

(the trouble continues...?)

A few months ago, my HDD became very noisy. I did not drop my computer, stomped on it (although I really want!) or did any other physical harm to it. The noise is continuous and is not only restricted to HDD reading or writing.

Instead of a gentle bsssssssss I got this BSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Are my HDD days numbered? Any idea what can cause a louder turning of my HDD?

7 7 7 7

[Jet II]

Your drives days are certainly numbered - make sure that you have backed-up everything of importance on it before it finally goes to the great 'Hard drive cemetary in the sky'

[Ronbmy]

Sounds like a classic case of the bearing about to collapse.

[Mac the Knife]

Its dying. Had that twice in the past with older smaller IDE drives and both died after a few weeks.

Same if you start getting repeated errors or bootup failures. DOS (and Windows 9.x) will not tell you that it is having increasing difficulty in finding a sector or sectors until it REALLY can't find it.

Clone your drive NOW to a new one [while you still can - you've probably only got a few boots left] and retire the noisy one (see some fairly recent posts on this forum).

[mcdhu]

Strangely enough, my machine is also making a louder 'whirring' noise than previously, but I wonder if it might be the cooling fan because if I shut it down to 'Standby', it still makes the noise. Presumably, when the machine is on standby, the HD is not doing anything.

The machine is a Dell Dimension series and is about 3 years old.

Any comments welcome.

Cheers,
mcdhu

[mcdhu]

TCS

Many thanks for that. I'll give it a go when I have some time. Thanks also for the safety warning.

Cheers,
mcdhu