How much hard drive noise is too much noise?

I'm concerned for the health of my hard drive. About 3 days ago, I started hearing a lot of grinding and clicking sounds. While I know that some sound is normal, I'm concerned about the increase.

SMART and all HP utilities show that nothing is out of the ordinary, and a sector level search by both Norton Disk Doctor and HD Tune show nothing wrong either.

Sound I follow my instinct (and hearing) and make HP replace the drive? Or should I wait until a more tell-tale sign has shown up?

I'm not worried about my data; I use Norton Ghost on a daily basis so I'm my drive goes south all I have to do is wait for the new drive, re-image, and I'm good.

 

When it seems so abnormal that you must post a thread about it =D

hehe, what kinds of noise are these noises? Just rapid humming? Maybe you have a 10,000 RPM ;-) ......if its the clicking or constantly spinning maybe you should check the temp + scandisk + defrag. Hope this helps.

 

@night_2004 - I wouldn't dilly-dally - backup your data in case your HD just dies. That can happen, and you are better off playing it safe, instead of having to do a lot of work recovering your data or spending a lot of dough having someone else do it.

 

@red: Mostly I'm hearing grinding sounds during boot up and rapid HDD access. Otherwise I hear intermittent clicking sounds...usually a few per second.

Temps are fine, and I just did a scan disk and defrag a few hours ago...no improvement.

@gautam3: I back up daily, and the last run was about 8pm last night. There won't be any major changes to my drive for a little while.

The other thing that I should probably add is that I recently got a few ccApp errors, a BSOD from some driver having some weird value (in which I've made no driver changes for months), and Norton complained about a system file of it's being corrupted. XP suddenly was un-login-able and Norton Ghost saved me by restoring my install. Is this the beginnings of failure? Or could I have done something dumb to corrupt those files myself?

 

My T42 got slightly noisier one day, the next it was gone.

 

Sounds like the same my brother had. Lasted for a month or so. Then the drive died...

Harddrives are not supposed to make clicking sounds.

 

Uh oh...I think I'm going to chat with HP out of caution. My PC just crashed so I think it's getting worse.