HDD sounds.. could I be paranoid?

[Erick Aguilar]

Hello guys.

I built this computer back in may of this year, and along with it I installed a seagate ST500DM002 which runs at 7200rpm. Now here's the thing.. the first time my computer ran was in summer, so I had two fans running in my room, which made hearing my computer practically impossible, and recently since the weather has been going down, I no longer need them, but -now- I notice that whenever my HDD light turns on, or flickers, there's a noise coming from my HDD which I assume could be writing, or data accessing, it only happens when the activity light turns on though, when switching windows,accessing folders, browsing, copying files, running ccleaner, and sometimes it does it even when I am not doing anything. It stays quiet when running games, music or video though.

I've heard some people say their seagate does the same, and others say theirs doesn't. And to be honest since I never really paid any attention until I turned my fans off I do not know if the hard drive made this little... whirring/click/scratch noise is?

But then I see -this- HDD Clicking, normally (HD) - YouTube and the sound my HDD makes is constant and very similar in terms of rhythm and sound respectively.

Maybe I am just being paranoid and it's normal?

Thank you for your time!

 

[Britton30]

Unless the sound is a hard clicking the sound is normal. During a game and music you're likely drawing the sound as with the fans on. I have a Seagate drive and I can hear the heads moving when the room is very quiet.

A bad click would be a sound similar to tapping the edge of a coin on a piece of glass. The read/write heads move up to 50MPH I have read and stop and reverse direction so there will be a very low frequency kind of a "thump" you'll hear.

Seagate has a good testing tool for their drives. http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/