Laptop HDD making clicking noise??

[maxsays]

so it started few days back, or weeks as i don't recall that i started hearing clicking noise at night when its all quite and am studying, i thought laptop fan is dirty so ignored it and it kept coming so last day i was puting my ear to laptop surface to check where exactly the sound is coming from. i have a hp pavillion 15 and the noise is coming from right hand side and its clearly hearable when i put my ear with surface of laptop, i think its hdd there as i hear something like fan too there, and the clicking noise has to do with hdd indicator because as it comes the hdd indicator led blinks.
anybody can tell me if its hdd or the light?? how can i fix this?

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, maxsays!

Unfortunately, there's no way to determine what is causing this issue without removing the case bottom. It's might be the fan, it might also be the optical disk drive that spins up randomly or, yes, the worst case scenario is the HDD.
However, if your laptop is still under warranty removing the case will void its warranty, so I'd not recommend it.
What you can do instead is backup the data on that HDD and be prepared for the worst.
Look for any other odd behaviour from the drive, for e.g. when you download files or when you stream a movie or play a game from it.
When you are finally sure what is the problem, I'd suggest to contact your laptop's tech support for assistance and maybe replace the defective component.

Hope this helped!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[InvalidError]

If the HDD LED blinks, it should mean something is accessing the HDD.

You may want to try running the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic just to be sure there is nothing obviously wrong with the HDD but you are most likely dealing with a software issue.

For example: HDD access noises are starting to drive me nuts simply from the principle that I do not want to hear activity when my computer is idle - I do not remember having this problem back with Vista. I used Process Explorer and Process Monitor to find out which programs were causing those accesses and ended up finding out that FireFox was updating its webstore database every 20 seconds, chrome writes some other file every minute, Skype appears to be running banner ads even when minimized which causes it to write to HDD every 30-60 seconds, etc. After all that junk, I end up with HDD access noise every 5-10 seconds.

 

[synphul]

If it's the hdd clicking, get any important data off it asap. When they give up the ghost, they do it good. That clicking is about all the warning you'll get.

 

[InvalidError]

If it's the hdd clicking, get any important data off it asap. When they give up the ghost, they do it good. That clicking is about all the warning you'll get.

The first thing I usually notice when HDDs fail is severe performance degradation with disk IOs taking 10-100X longer than normal increasingly frequently due to read/write errors and retries.

When the HDD is really about to die from such a progressive (non-catastrophic/sudden) failure, you may start seeing "Delayed Write Failed" pop-up notifications because the HDD decided to quit responding altogether and at that point, you may still be able to bring the HDD back up by power-cycling it. If you are lucky, you may be able to get a few more hours to backup stuff out of it this way before it fails completely.

 

[synphul]

That's handy, wish I'd gotten those errors on the seagate barracudas that died on me. No visuals for error like a report and no real noticeable performance drop. Instead on next reboot got "error - system disk failure" or whatever it says when it can't read the hdd after post. One clicked, the other didn't. Made a mistake that the clicking was a fan because there was a cooling fan real close to a cable mounted against the hdd cage.

 

[parth8007]

so it started few days back, or weeks as i don't recall that i started hearing clicking noise at night when its all quite and am studying, i thought laptop fan is dirty so ignored it and it kept coming so last day i was puting my ear to laptop surface to check where exactly the sound is coming from. i have a hp pavillion 15 and the noise is coming from right hand side and its clearly hearable when i put my ear with surface of laptop, i think its hdd there as i hear something like fan too there, and the clicking noise has to do with hdd indicator because as it comes the hdd indicator led blinks.
anybody can tell me if its hdd or the light?? how can i fix this?

hii dear,
I am also facing the same problem, I am using HP Pavilion 15 ab032tx model, the same sound of clicking noise at night when its all quiet and I encountered it this was my hard disk which was making clicking noise in synchronization with the hdd indicator led light, so can you please provide me the solution that you applied to solve this problem.
thanks in advance !