Noise from Hard Disk Drive

Absolutely. You're lucky the drive is dying gracefully and giving you a chance to backup everything. Laptop drives usually don't die this way.

Are you sure it's the HDD and not the fan? Laptop fans often become noisy when cold as they age. If it is definitely the HDD, I'd back up your files and look for a replacement as the bearings don't have to have much play at all before you lose data and get head crashes. You should be able to pick up a bigger drive, say a 6GB, for very little money on eBay.

Dave

It could go on like that for years, or it could die tomorrow. At the very least backup your data now! 1.6 GB is nothing to backup these days and you'll be kicking yourself if you don't do it.

Any unusual noise from a hard drive is a bad sign. I have to admit that I haven't noticed any connection between bearing noise and drive failure though. I don't think I've ever actually seen a hard drive fail due to bad bearings. I've seen dozens of bad hard drives and most had perfectly quiet bearings. I've also seen lots of really noisy drives that still worked fine. Andy Cuffe

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