Question HDD mysterious clicking

[Shuffleblade]

I've had all my games/programs on my windows SSD drive and everything else on my secondary HDD that is roughly 8 years old or so.

I've had 0 trouble with my HDD and two days ago I exchanged my computer for a brand new pre assembled and with windows and everything pre installed. I took my HDD out of my old computer and hooked it into my new one.

Went to bed and left the computer on during the night installing and downloading stuff and when I awake my computer was strangely clicking, loud disturbing sounds. I shut it down, went to work, came home and when I put my computer on after 1-2 hours or so the clicking starts again. I check inside and it seems to come from my HDD, its the only HDD in there the windows drive is SSD. I start trying to backup my data to other external harddrives but it goes real slow, sometimes the copying speed went down to 0 for brief periods. While backuping my data i hear the clicking to and fro, after a while it starts clicking for a long time and then my windows tells me the disk has been "removed" or something like that.

I cant find the drive on my computer anymore and panic, shut my computer down and desperately change place on my physical HDD, which cables its plugged into. I start it up again and the clicking is gone, everything is back to normal for 4 hours or so and then the clicking is back. I restart my computer and the clicking continues, make no difference, then I shut my computer down and goes to brush my teeth, comes back and powers it up again. The clicking is gone.... I continue backing up and fixing for 30 minutes or so, no clicking, I left my computer on to backup files during the night and when I wake up no clicking.

I'm seriously at a loss about what is going on here, my HDD worked fine on my previous computer, all I did was plug it into a new one. I know the clicking is a sign of HDD failure and that something is wrong but I can't figure out what since the problem seems to appear and disappear randomly without any clear pattern. Can anyone else see what might be wrong here? I'm also worried about if the problem is the computer itself because then buying a new HDD would just be a waste.

 

[herrwizo]

That HDD is slowely but surely dying. Luckily for you, it did not die outright, but it will surely happen soon. When, noone can tell for sure - it can be within a day or within a month. But this is bound to happen 100%.

Backup everything from it while you still can.

And yes, mechanical HDDs often tend to die in this manner - start clicking, show up and disappear from the system... nothing strange here. The computer is not the problem, it is the drive.

 

[Shuffleblade]

That HDD is slowely but surely dying. Luckily for you, it did not die outright, but it will surely happen soon. When, noone can tell for sure - it can be within a day or within a month. But this is bound to happen 100%.

Backup everything from it while you still can.

And yes, mechanical HDDs often tend to die in this manner - start clicking, show up and disappear from the system... nothing strange here. The computer is not the problem, it is the drive.

Thank you for the quick answer, you are probably right, the timing was just so ridiculous, same day I moved it to a new computer and the situation surrounding it. Thanks to your quick advice I have now bought a new HDD, backuped everything and removed my clicking drive. =)

 

[jsmithepa]

Run a s.m.a.r.t. monitor will tell you life expectancy.

 

[talric79]

I have also just had this happen to me, yesterday and a week ago. A Barracuda and a Samsung. I find it hard to swallow that 2 drives failed within a week of each other. The first happened after a windows update, the restart after the update than the drive was done. The latest failure causes windows to stall during startup and does not see the drive with a hot-swap. Any suggestions? This rig is an i5-4670K, asus Z87-Pro, with an 840 Pro boot, TridentX 2400 CL10, GTX780, Windows 10 Home (64bit)