Noisy Hard Drive

Two things come to mind on noisy HDs. Either the HD has "harmonic resonance" due to metal to metal contact from it mounting. Or the HD is so hot and cause some bearing tolerances to be pushed.

Remove the side cover to allow cooling to take place, if the problem lessens, get your hands on a HD cooler to better cool it. You may need to relocate the HD itself in order to let the HD cooler be installed due to space.

The HD mounting screws maybe too tight, loosen them and retighten to snug fit. -OR- place a small rubber washer between screw(s) and metal flange. -OR- reloacte HD to another space if possibel. You didn't mention it, but clean out the system case as well to better cool the system. These are areas to look into, but it could be something else, especially a HD failure coming, so take precaustion and safe-guard your data(back it up) just in case. Also, understand it maybe possible not the HD is noisy but a fan, so check into those as well.

good luck -----Willy

The real question is, what is really making the noise, is it the computer, or the hard drive inside the computer. Many people incorrectly call their computer a "hard drive", not realizing that the hard drive itself is just a small device inside the computer box.

If you are calling your computer a "hard drive" then the problem could be a case or processor fan, and you have to open the case and narrow this down.

If the noise really is the hard drive, then you may have one that is starting to go, especially if it has been getting noisier, noise from a hard drive is one sign of iminent failure.


A system that came with Windows Millennium is dated, and many are old in computer years. How many years old is it, Millennium came out over 4 years ago, in that time fans start to go as well as CD drives.

I repair infected computers. Since I've started this work I have become aware of certain trends related to specific kinds of computers and operating systems. Not so strangely enough, is the trend I've noticed with name brand OEM computers using Windows ME which is most specifically, noisy hard drives ...either difficult or unable to be defragmented. I've examined these drives in detail(with my customers' permissions) and discovered each to be on the verge of a head crash due to a corrupted media surface. This in turn being caused by disk thermal warpage. And whereas most of the drives were Western Digital Caviars, at least one was a Seagate. The outward symptoms often mimick computer activity resembling a viral attack. Also, a drive that's been upgraded from ME to XP will have the same symptoms. I have partially discerned that the root cause for this lies in the logic method used by ME to access the drive which blindly allows excessive retries on FAT32. Win ME tends to missread the BIOS geometry tables thus functionally missdirecting the EDI controller. This causes overheating. To prove this, I installed a new Seagate hard drive in a test computer and formatted it using NTFS instead of FAT32 and loaded ME. Despite the old computer's 460mz CPU, the fresh ME operating system on NTFS caused the computer to work as fast as my new computer with XP and with no problems whatsoever. I held the running drive next to my ear to listen for retries on a test defragmentation and I heard only a few. Mostly, what I heard was the smooth rhythmetic cadence of a "well-oiled" head arm pulsing from track to track; after several hours there was no overheating whatsoever. The best thing to do with a noisy hard drive is to xfer the data you want to save to an external hard drive as soon as possible; you may not get another chance!