Solved Hard drive running extremely loud

[book]

I replaced my laptop's hard drive around August 2016 and one night in December (around Christmas) when I woke it up from sleep mode, it started making loud screaming noises. Nowadays it's like that right when I turn it on and stays that way the entire time I use it. It gets the loudest if I let it fall asleep and wake it up. Once in a while it's completely normal, no screaming noises. (as I'm typing this now, the noise is not at possessed-demon level but it was like that when I turned in on ~10 minutes ago but it's randomly getting louder and getting quieter etc, my old hard drive was not like that at all, it only got loud when I was playing MMOs)

I've used HD Tune Pro a bunch of times to check on it but it claims everything is fine. I ran chkdsk back in December but it was fine.

Taken just now:

December 2016 as you can see in the corner:

I've uploaded an unlisted video to YouTube of my laptop singing to demons.

My laptop specs:

Toshiba Portege R835-P50X
Intel i3-2310M @ 2.1 GHz
4 GB RAM

This is the hard drive that came with the laptop (purchased June 2011, replaced August 2016):

This is the replacement I am using that is misbehaving:

I just want to know if anyone can figure out why it's doing this. Did I just get unlucky and get a faulty hard drive or is something else going on?

 

[mjf]

It sounds dreadful. Are you sure the sound is definitely coming from the HDD and not a fan for example?
If so back up your data and make a system image to an external HDD. At the moment I can't see any problems in the SMART data you posted. I think HGST is Hitachi taken over by WD which looks like a very close replacement.

If the drive is still under warranty I'd get it replaced.

 

[Ranger4]

Sounds like a noisy fan to me. A HDD making that much noise would probably fail to work.

 

[SCANNERMAN777]

Noisy Hard Drive? Or bad fan

Sounds like a noisy fan to me. A HDD making that much noise would probably fail to work.

I was just about to say the same thing. If the health of the hard drive is as illustrated then I highly doubt it is the hard drive. You might want to check your fans.

 

[book]

Ok. Tried to test it by removing the hard drive and turning on the laptop. Noise was still there. So it's the fan? I removed the cover and took a look and everything seems okay to my amateur eye... Cleaned some dust out, put everything back, turned it back on and still screaming at me. Could something other than dust (I might have missed some unknowingly) be causing this issue?

 

[mjf]

It looks like you need a fan replacement. If you can turn the laptop on with the cover removed it should be easy to locate the source of the sound. I think you have a cpu cooling fan.

 

[Ranger4]

Ok. Tried to test it by removing the hard drive and turning on the laptop. Noise was still there. So it's the fan? I removed the cover and took a look and everything seems okay to my amateur eye... Cleaned some dust out, put everything back, turned it back on and still screaming at me. Could something other than dust (I might have missed some unknowingly) be causing this issue?

Noisy fans are usually caused by dry bearings & nothing can successfully be done to rectify that, other than replacing the fan.

The fan will look perfectly normal & can usually be turned easily by hand, but when running at speed the dry bearings start howling.

If you have any doubts about how to replace the CPU fan it would be best to take it to a reliable computer shop & get them to do it.