How to Listen for Hard Drive Problems

You are happily working on your computer when you hear a new clicking, singing, whirring or scratching sound. Chances are you do not have a family of squirrels living in your computer. Hard drives often begin to make telling noises before they finally crash and once heard you had better backup fast. Knowing what's normal and what isn't can save you from HDD heartbreak.

Instructions

1. Listen closely to the sound the drive is making. Fast whirring sounds, clicking, singing and scratching sounds are all common before a hard drive takes its last breath.

2. Understand that a clicking sound is the platter and head slapping together. Backup now if necessary and defragment the data on the drive. Severely fragmented drives can make a clicking sound when searching for data and this drive may not be bad.

3. Check the "Startup" menu if the drive is singing, whirring or scratching constantly or intermittently. Bad drive sectors create errors that display on the windows boot up screen and indicate that the drive is unfixable. The constant scratching destroys the remaining data so swap this drive as quickly as possible.

4. Replace drives every five years if data loss is a serious concern. Drives older than five years have a high probability of failing without warning.

5. Start a regular backup routine to an external device to ensure critical data isn't lost to an unexpected drive failure. Hard drives that begin to make noise may last minutes, hours or even months but failure is coming.