“Its ticking” or its "Buzzing".
These are conversation starters we hear every day in enquiries made by clients. These noises are generally bad news and the below goes into detail about what’s happening inside your hard drive if it's making abnormal sounds.
To be clear, so you don’t read this article while your hard drive is clicking next to you, we strongly advise you pull the power from any drive that is making unusual sounds especially clicking drives. These noise can be extensive damage occurring that’s pushing any later data recovery efforts further away from a successful result.
I would stress that in either of the below two events, the drive will need to be carefully disassembled by an expert in a specialist environment to have any real chance at saving the data.
Hard drives are designed to be hard to get into so only those who have the correct tools, experience and environments work on them. Trying to resolve a physically damaged drive without the above is akin to having a migraine and reaching for a scalpel yourself.
Clicking Hard Drive:
The clicking you are hearing is actually the read/write mechanism in the drive returning, with force, to the parking area of the drive. This is generally occurring because the read/write mechanism is physically damaged. The bad part is that it may be imparting serious damage to the internal platters or storage media of your hard drive. There is a point of no return, and, if left long enough, the clicking could push the damage so far that not even specialist labs such as ours with clean room facilities and years of experience can enact a recovery.
Buzzing Hard Drive:
Buzzing generally indicates that there has been a motor failure on a drive or that the read/write mechanism has failed and fused to the platter or media surface. In either of these cases either a platter swap or a head swap will need to be undertaken to make the drive temporarily operable for the purpose of data recovery.
Our team is reachable via the 0800 328 2522 free call number any time in NZ and we would encourage anyone experiencing any of the above drive symptoms to call through and have a chat with an expert about recovery options.
Find the below link also for directions as to what to do next