Hard drive creating rhythmic noise, not sure what it is.

[drambit]

I currently have a Seagate Barricuda 500GB 7200RPM running as a slave drive. It is still operating fine, but for some odd reason it makes this very consistent very annoying rhythmic sound. It's not quite clicking, and it's not beeping, more like some sort of very quiet and subtle grinding about 4 times a second. It's hard to describe the sound, but I looked up common hard drive problems and I didn't see my specific one described anywhere so this is the best I have basically.

Any ideas of what it might be? I'll get audio if I can but it is very quiet and probably hard to pick up well with a microphone, so for now the description is the best I have.

 

[i7Baby]

Any noisy drives are suspect.

First thing is to make a back-up of any info you want off the drive.

Then check it with Seatools.

 

[sirstinky]

It's slowly dying. Hard Drives that make any kind of noise other than the normal clicking, like beeping, and especially rhythmic ones (like on a constant loop) is a very bad sign. Even if it's not having any outward issues as far as freezing or crashing, it's still sick. Backup your files. Don't use Window's HDD diagnostic utility. Seatools is good, but there are others you can run from the command line that are good. Either way, make boot disk from the Seatools .iso and boot from it. Follow the instructions and you'll be good to go.