Should Hard Drives sound like there is sand in them when shaking?

[Evan Shaffer]

Yes, I know. It's a dumb question. I just want to know what went wrong.

I have a 500GB WD Black hard drive that was my storage drive that just recently stopped working. It won't read in DiskPart as a drive and simply makes intermittent, high-pitched whining/spinning noises when powered, as if it is a DVD drive attempting to read a scratched disk.

So, I removed the drive and shook it. Oddly enough, it sounds like there is sand sloshing around inside the thing. My question is, what is it and why did it do this? I simply want to know if it is just a bad drive, or if it was from an error of my setup that caused it.

 

[azathoth]

Head crash? Perhaps the read/write head made physical contact with the platter, and that sound you're hearing is small metal fragments. That would be my guess.

 

[Evan Shaffer]

Head crash? Perhaps the read/write head made physical contact with the platter, and that sound you're hearing is small metal fragments. That would be my guess.

That was my first thought, but it sounds a lot finer than fragments. As if it were actual ground-up pieces. It may be that though, but I don't know why. It was just working with no problems, but then I did a reboot and the drive stopped responding and ended up messing with the OS on the SSD. The drive appears in the motherboard, but won't show up in the OS.

It may have had this sand-shake noise for any period of time. I just noticed it when it stopped working and removed the drive. There was no physical moving of the drive when it stopped working, just a reboot, and then done, so no physical damage, unless it was from previous movement of the drive, and only now the problems arise. But oddly enough, the last time I moved the drive/desktop was months ago.