Seagate external hard drive beeping, computer sometimes freezing.

[Creator13]

There seem to be enough questions on the internet with a similar problem, but I can't find a situation that resembles mine closely enough so that's why I'm asking. The main difference between my situation is that the drive will still show up in Windows Explorer just fine.

What's happening is that sometimes my external hard drive, a Seagate Expansion Portable 1TB, will make beeping noises. Today when booting my computer, the noise came as soon as the Windows 10 login screen showed. Then again when I opened the drive in Windows Explorer and once more while browsing the drive. Now, not everytime it's possible to browse the drive. Sometimes the complete Windows Explorer process will freeze while trying to browse it (which is happening as I type this). Now, as it might seem, the Windows Explorer process is the backbone of Windows, so whenever my Explorer freezes I'm unable to do anything which requires file loading (for example, starting Notepad++). Strangely enough I can perfectly launch applications such as browsers. I can't however turn off my computer.

I've used HD Tune Pro to check the drive status and it is not giving me any errors.

Some say this might be a power problem, and since I'm powering the thing through USB 2, while it might expect USB 3, that could still be an option. However, if I remember correctly, the reason I switched it to a USB 2 port was because the freezing happened.

The first two times the freezing happened was when I was using Adobe Lightroom, and Lightroom would keep loading an image. I went to the drive in explorer and bam I couldn't do anything functional on my computer anymore (except browsing the web). This has happened twice now.

The beeping is something relatively new, I recently started hearing it sparsely, now it happened over three times during a single bootup. The drive hasn't moved more than a centimeter since the first beep and now. I did however take it with me on my trip during the christmas break, which could in theory have damaged the drive.

I was able to copy a ~10GB folder from the drive to my internal disk in 4 minutes without problem.

I bought the drive in late August, so it isn't older than 5 months.

I have critical data stored on the drive, which I'm trying to backup now.

I'll try to use the drive in my laptop and update you with what happens. I'll also try to run a more complete diagnostic, after I've copied the bulk of the critical data from the drive, as well as install the proper USB 3 drivers and try it with my USB 3 ports. In the meantime I was hoping you could give me some additional ideas as to what's going on.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

If I remember right, those drives don't have any sort of speaker or sound capability. If they sound like they're beeping, it's indicative of some sort of mechanical issue.

 

[Creator13]

If I remember right, those drives don't have any sort of speaker or sound capability. If they sound like they're beeping, it's indicative of some sort of mechanical issue.

I understand where that comes from, and something like this is also a possibility I had in mind. However, it happens at fairly illogical intervals or patterns and that's what's throwing me off bit.

 

[Creator13]

Quick update: I'm slowly copying data from the drive to my internal disk, the copying is currently stuck and Explorer not responding but I've not yet heard any noise. I'm using USB 3 with the proper drivers as well. I've already copied two 10GB folder as of right now, those without any issue. Now I'm going to try it with my laptop. Oh.. and it seems to continue suddenly right as I'm typing, with the occasional hanging (drops to 0B/second). Another thing that is interesting to me is how my computer basically fails to shut down when the drive is stuck. It is not a system-critical drive, so why would my computer bother? Is it waiting for the drive to give an appropriate response? What is happening is that the Windows "shutting down" screen is showing, then my monitor turns off but the computer keeps running. I've let it run for about 20 minutes the first time it happened before long-pressing the power button.

EDIT: even though it's copying with a lot of hanging, all the data seems to be completely intact, which is very counter-intuitive to my brain.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

The shutting down thing could be write-caching. If some parts of the disk aren't responsive they'll sit queued up forever. Or the more common disk-in-use-cannot-eject issues.

I've read that you can get a beep like sound when the read heads are sticky. Not necessarily to the spinning disk, but also moving back and forth (seeking). That could explain why it's intermittent. It would depend where on the disk the data is stored, which head is accessing it, and what sectors it moves the head across. The disk could be undamaged, but it wouldn't always be able to read/write to it.

Since your data seems intact, keep trying to copy. It may help to select different files at a time, or worst case 1 file at a time. Then go back and keep trying the stuck files. Intermittent failure also means intermittent success too.