Weird Hard Drive Power Down Sounds

[DiabeticComa]

So I have been having these sounds coming from one of my Hard Drives for a long time now (must be a year now). It's not the OS disk since that one is brand new and not my data disk because the sound was there before I got that one. That leaves my with my old data disk, a 320Gb Western Digital.

What I hear is a pretty loud click and then a power down sound, like something is stopping rotating (basic power down sound). The click is doesn't sound like a breaking click but more like a short click.

Funny thing is that I keep all my games there now and this happens randomly when I'm playing and the game isn't affected by it, when I had my videos on there before I bought my new data disk it used to do that even while playing videos but it didn't do anything, video playback was unaffected.
Basically my system is not at all affected by this but it's annoying.

It's not a fan problem, cause I only got 2 fans in my computer, one in back and other on GPU, (heatsink on CPU) and both are running fine. The sound is definately coming from the hard drive.

Technical details:

Vista 64
AMD 6000+
Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4
Nvidia 8600GTS

 

[enzo matrix]

Hard drive is dying. Back up all your data from that drive before it fails. Everything you said isn't affected isn't because stuff is loaded to the ram and if not, the pagefile is on your brand new hard drive. There is nothing you can do to stop it from failing.

 

[DiabeticComa]

Ok, thanks. I thought that also when it first started doing this but I still kept it plugged just to have until it dies completely. But after some time I started wondering, it's been a year now and still alive so I thought it might be some power save thing in bios or something. So ur sure it's been failing for over a year?

 

[enzo matrix]

That does seem like a long time. In that case I really don't know. I'd still keep my data backed up and prepare for the worst.

 

[Guest]

I've been expriencing exactly the same behaviour. I'm running Windows 7 64b. My computer has installed two Seagate Barracuda HDs. One thing I'm totally sure of is, this has nothing to do with a HD dying. I started experiencing this since I upgraded to Windows 7. BOTH my hard drives have the same clicking sound followed by the powering off sound.
One drive dying... that's normal. Both ? Thinking this had probably something to do with an agonizing drive, I bought a new one and installed it. Nothing changed. As soon as W7 recognized the new drive, the clicking and rest of sfx started.

I've made sure I have all the firmware, drivers etc. up to date. Could this be related to the SATA controller ? Maybe some speciall hidden W7 feature that makes my drives go idle for a while for energy saving purposes ???