HDD making high-pitched clinking sound normal? (audio recording inc)

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JackoThe1st

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Sep 11, 2015
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Hi gang,

I'm very new to desktop computing (two days) but I'm fairly certain I've never head an HDD make quite this sound before, having listened and watched a bunch of YT vids on normal and abnormal noises. It's a high pitched mechanical scraping noise that happens every now and again, maybe a few times a minute or sometimes every 30 mins or so whether I'm running programs or just idle. It's a Seagate Barracuda Sata III 1TB HDD.

I've recorded a couple of clips. You can hear it well enough over the fans (and washing machine!) but I can remove HDD from case and re-record if needed.

First clip is HDD being mostly idle, occasionally I click the start and stop button within 'HD Tune', not exactly sure what that does? It's a 20 min recording edited down to one minute so the noise doesn't ocuur anywhere near as frequently as what you can hear!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10974500/HDD%20audio%201.wav

Second clip is doing a 'quick error scan' using same program. Sounds like normal seeking sounds but then the noise comes back after the scan is finished and I begin to play a YouTube vid. The suspect sound you hear is NOT coming from the video.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10974500/HDD%20audio%202.wav

I'd much appreciate it if someone could take a listen and give me a verdict, thanks. Hopefully the links work.
 
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ahh I see yeh WD (I think...
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Adam Ashworth

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Dec 28, 2013
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Hi JackoThe1st

In general the advice I would give someone hearing these type of noises from their hard drive would be to make a back up as soon as you can especially if you have anything valuable or irreplaceable on there. Scratching/winding/clicking noises tend to signal the beginning of the end unfortunately.
 
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JackoThe1st

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Sep 11, 2015
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I've since discovered that some hard drives, in particular some WD and Seagate drives, do this thing called head parking to save energy. Mine seems to make the sound after 60 seconds of inactivity so I'm starting to think that it's actually normal. Some do it after as little as 8 seconds. Apparently there might be a firmware update for my drive that might disable the head parking, I still need to do some digging.

But I'm still very puzzled as to why the internet isn't already flooded with threads regarding this issue with my exact hard drive since they are advertised heavily on some sites and are quite cheap at the moment. All I've found is just one guy on Amazon who mentioned it in a his review...

 
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Adam Ashworth

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Dec 28, 2013
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ahh I see yeh WD (I think green line?) parked the heads when the drive was inactive for a while to save power. I've heard the noise from this can become quite annoying, although I have never dealt with it myself. I seem to remember people found a fix for this, something along the lines of a program that pings the HDD every so often to prevent it head parking. try googling something along the lines of "HDD model" "head parking fix" you may well find a download to such a program.
 
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JackoThe1st

Reputable
Sep 11, 2015
3
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4,510

I'll look into that, sounds like a good solution, albeit a bit inconvenient. I'm still pondering whether to RMA it due to 'excessive noise' just in case it actually is louder than it should be. Thanks for your help.
 
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