Audible noise from the hard drive

I'm the happy owner of a Lenovo T60 and has been that for two weeks now. Earlier today I noticed that my hard drive makes some kind of a buzzing noise due to its constant spinning. I've never noticed that before. I can hear when it read/writes but I never noticed the buzz before now.

I'm not sure its been there before as I think I would've noticed. The hard drive is a Hitachi 7200RPM 7K100 100GB.

I tried different things to lower the noise such as NHC without any audible results. The small LED indicator for hard drive activity is just flashing occasionally.

Is there anything I could do ?

 

Question:

When you reboot your computer does it stop?

Is the sound always there? Or it appear randomly or after opening a software?

 

I used to have dual 7K100 100gb drives in my U709, and they were pretty quiet, mainly because they sit in a shock absorbing tray.

If you want to quiet your harddrive, either listen to extremely loud music so you do not hear the harddrive anymore, or try to add some kind of shock absorbing rubber to the harddrive caddy. It will help reduce vibrations.

K-TRON

 

... or your harddrive might be failing, in which case you may want to start backing up your data in the event that it DOES fail. Check your SMART status, though poor readings are not always indicative of drive failure, and vice versa.

 

The noise is always there and keeps the same level at all time. From the time I turn on the computer and till the computer shuts down.

The SMART status is good enough. The sound is not disturbing and it doesn't sound like the drive is about to fail or anything. Its just a humming which is pretty loud. It sounds almost exactly as the fan (but it isn't) and is almost as loud as the fan noise.

And I can't fogure out whether the noise was there a couple of days ago or if I just noticed it now.

 

In that case it may just be that the drive is getting old... I have some old desktop drives that sound like that (kinda like a fan, but a bit sharper?) but those are in the range of 4-5 years and the T60 is by no means 4-5 years old. Though if it IS just mechanical wear on the drive, there's not much you can do to fix it.

 

i would get hitachi's accoustic management tool. that should give you better control than nhc. if you are worried about hd failure, dl hitachi's hd diagnostic tool and run a scan.

 

My T60 is only 3 weeks old. So I hope not its because of the drive is getting old already. Anyway, I still can't remember whether the noise was there a couple of days ago.