HDD Noise

[120inna55]

My friend recently gave me a refurb HP Pavilion p7-1417c as a gift. It stayed in the box for a couple of months until I got around to purchasing a monitor. I essentially only use it to rip my blu-ray collection.

I've noticed, while idle, the HDD randomly makes a chirp. It's not a click, per se, and it's not an electronic beep. I've had my share of failing HDDs, and this doesn't sound like the tick or click that I've heard on a failing drive. It essentially sounds like a needle dragging on a vinyl record only at a much higher frequency and probably less than 1 sec duration. My initial thought is that the HDD is going to fail, but it never makes the sound while I'm using it. It may be as frequent as every minute up to every 10 minutes. I have the power settings such that the HDD never hibernates, because I often log on remotely while I'm at work to perform follow-up tasks (something I can't do if the drive hibernates).

The drive is a 2TB Seagate Barracuda. I'm not sure about the model number, specifically.

Since I only use the PC for the aforementioned purpose, there's nothing on the HDD that is of importance, other than, of course, the Windows 8 OS. If the drive does fail, or if I'm proactive and take it to my local computer repair shop for them to replace the drive, how will the OS be retained? It didn't come with a disc (as I expect many OEM PCs don't anymore).

 

[John Kotches]

I'm wondering if that could be the heads parking during idle to lower the risk of a head crash.

 

[bhawley]

I have a friend who complained that his new Toshiba laptop drive made a clicking noise, we discovered that Toshiba had installed a selfcheck app. that caused the drive head to click.

 

[120inna55]

It's just bizarre that even performing mundane tasks such as net surfing, or even just periodically moving the mouse on the desktop, it will not make the noise, but as soon as I quit using it, the random sounds return. I've just about convinced myself that it's normal operation, so I'm not going to worry about it unless I see a performance degradation.

 

[gripesofwrath]

As for your Windows 8 question: if it didn't come with a disc there's most likely a recovery partition on the drive. Browse around in the HP installed apps and look for a program that will make an OS recovery DVD for you. (Sorry, but I'm not sure exactly what that program is called. But it should be pretty obvious.)

 

[120inna55]

I'm wondering if that could be the heads parking during idle to lower the risk of a head crash.

The consensus is that this is in fact the case. After further research, I've discovered that this is a common occurrence with this particular drive, and it is harmless.