The sounds of beeps and clicks coming from a hard drive are about as welcome as an engine fire on an airplane. While less dangerous, it could be a sign of lost data and hardware in your immediate future.
Why do hard drives beep or click?
Hard drives aren’t designed to make R2D2-style beeps, clicks, or any other noises. They’re designed to run as quietly as possible (especially SSDs, which generally don’t have moving parts), so if one of them in your device has suddenly gotten noisy, it’s likely that you have a problem.
Clicks can be caused by a number of issues, including physical damage, poor power, or misaligned read/write heads. Beeps have a similar set of causes, namely stuck read/write heads, motor malfunction, damaged cables or ports, or insufficient power. In either case, it can mean you’re about to experience complete hard drive failure.
Regardless of the cause of the noise, it’s important to seek the assistance of a skilled professional. Being able to diagnose the source of error in a hard drive is still vastly different from being able to repair it or to extract data from it, and professionals have access to sophisticated hardware and software-based tools that can mean the difference between a major crisis and a minor inconvenience.
What should you do?
If you hear your hard drive, or even just your computer making odd noises, it’s important to act quickly and if possible proactively. Contact your IT provider right away. Timely intervention could help to extract your data to a new functioning drive before calamity strikes. If it’s too late and your hard drive has already departed for the great mainframe in the sky, they can contact data recovery experts such as DriveSavers (see banner below) to reclaim your data quickly and efficiently. It may cost a few extra dollars, but that typically pales to the loss of time, productivity, and data that usually accompanies device failure.
Nervous about the noise your computer’s making? Not sure how to set up a backup system for when disaster strikes? Nodal can help! Contact us today.