Hard Drive Potential Problem
 

I have noticed that my hard drive (WD 200GB) has been making more noise as of the past 2 weeks. It is not a constant noise, only when writing/reading. It doesn't sound bad, but it isn't normal.
I have downloaded a couple hard drive health programs to read the S.M.A.R.T. data and it has found nothing out of the ordinary. The drive is almost 3 years old and I'm thinking if I should start looking for an external hard drive to begin and backup my information for the potential death.

WD usually have 3 year warranties, you can RMA it with cross shipping, so they give you the new drive first, image the old to the new, and return the old, i did that several times with my old 120 gig WD's

Dilbert has the right answer there. I've noticed that once drives start making noises it just gets progressively worse until your cursing the fact that you did not take action earlier to back-up everything on it, or to RMA it before the warranty was up.

Make sure you run a chkdsk and a defrag before you do that. SMART programs are not very helpful.

Recently, I had a hard drive that went through a "phase" where it made some horrendous noises, but it's been just fi

My personal rule of thumb is that if a hard drive ever starts doing things out of the ordinary, it's time to make sure it's backed up and replace it. In my experience, hard drives simply do NOT get better. Once they start making noise, it's on to data corruption and read failures and death in less time than you want.

Give western digital a call and tell them whats happening. they will most likely ask for a credit card number and charge you like $45 or something then ship out a new hard drive and have you send the broke one back to them in the box from the new one. when they get it back they refund the money back to you. At least thats what they did for me when my hard drive died. They didnt really ask any questions or anything. Was basicly just oh your hard drive is making noise ok heres what we can do. They are a good company and i doubt they will just let you deal with a dieing hard drive. As long as they still stock a hard drive thats the same as what you have they should replace it for you.

I gotta agree what what has already been said. Once a drive starts having issues you are on borrowed time. Back it up and replace it.

Just to echo... Back it up, back it up, back it up.

Start with just the important files. Copy things on your desktop and in My Documents or wherever you hide your walnuts, then grab an image of the entire thing.

Yes, noises are bad. It might not mean the drive will die soon but it often does. I had another customer on Friday with a misbehaving Dell laptop. It started to crash with driver problems and would no longer boot. Once I replaced a few "missing" system files the owner mentioned it made noises. Only now and then. I made it 90% through a backup when it horked up a lung. I might be able to recover the rest with parts swapping but basically the $70 drive (2yr old travelstar 80) and the 10% we couldn't get are now candidates for $2500 recovery service.

These incidents are far and away my least favorite part of computer work.

Drives are cheap these days, and terribly unreliable. Given the huge quantities you can lose do not rely on just one.