TechLighten

TechLighten yourself on everything tech!

So I recently upgraded my notebook’s internal hard disk from a 160GB Toshiba to a 500GB Toshiba one. It was getting harder for me to maintain my downloaded stuff like movies and games on the 160GB small hdd so the upgrade was inevitable.

After some thinking I purchased the 500 gb hard drive and spent some time trying copy the windows installation partition from the old hard drive to the new one via different partition image making applications. Majority of the these partition making applications work from within the operating system and you cannot make a copy of the current Window’s partition from within the operation system so you need to boot the PC with a bootable media and run the partition cloning application from there. Anyway I never got to that stage and I was tired enough to let go the idea of making copy of the operating systems partion.

The next plan was to install a fresh copy of Windows into the new hard disk. Up til this point, I was running the new hdd externally from a USB enclosure. Near the end of the partition copying plan, I started hearing a strange clicking sound and I thought it might be the old toshiba HDD. To my surprise, the sound was coming from the new hdd and that was kind of shocking because I was in no mood of taking back the new hard drive for a replacement back to the store. I decided to keep using the HDD because the click sound wasn’t very frequent. So I proceed and installed the new hdd into my laptop.

For the next few days, I kept hearing frequent abnormal clicks from the hdd. Usually, I’d hear a click once an hour or every two hours. It was annoying and I wasn’t happy because the Idea of a new hdd crashing AFTER you’ve reinstalled a ton of applications and drivers and have started making the new disk your new home. Well, with time, over the last few weeks, the clicking sound frequency went down and now the clicks occurs barely 2 to 3 times a day. A friend of mine mentioned it might be the reading head of the disk striking the cover of the hdd and might be nothing dangerous because the only thing that’d be worrying is if your hdd head is touching the surface of the spindle.

I’m still wondering what might be the real cause of the strange noise and have searched around and read different reviews on the types of sounds that failing hdds make but haven’t heard about a scenario that is similar to mine. Guess only time will tell if these sounds were the warning of dying disk or not. So far I haven’t had any problems with file transfer speeds and basic operations on my PC.