moving parts equal the ability to have something break. Take the law of large # and quite a few are bound to have a moving part break. Odds are you have a bad hard drive It's probably under warranty if computer is less than a year old Robert
Yes, this is generally the precursor to drive failure. When will the drive fail? Good question. Try not to be caught un-backed up when the answer arrives. As a computer tech who relies heavily on laptops for business, loud hard drives are never a good sign. The thing that really should start your teeth grinding is the increase of the fan running. Back up the data, bite the bullet, get a new drive. Unless, that machine is near the end of its useful life. Someone in this thread said that drives generally outlive machine usefulness. Make sure you're not prolonging the death march of an overdue machine.
Punter, I have had the same exact problems you had. First my 13gig Toshiba laptop drive started whinning, I didn't even bother with the warranty. Just bought a new one as the noise was driving me nuts. The new drive, IBM 20gig. And 3 months later, the silent drive was making an even greater whine sound....just drives my ears crazy. I can't use that machine for long because of the noise. Then I found out. What you want is a fluid bearing drive. I had that on my desktop. Seagate Barracuda 4. It wasn't avaliable in laptops until about 1 month ago, and needless to say, I bought it. It runs silent, and even better still, it runs at the faster 5,400rpm, so everything seems more snappy on my P3 450! The model you want is IBM GNX series. NOT GN. You want GNX!!! Do a search on pricewatch.com. I bought mine 20gig on googlegear.com. Great price, silent drive, and fast. They have 20,40 and higher capacity. Look it up on IBM. FYI, yeah, I've silenced my desktop as well, with special CPU coolers and fans. Everything is silent in my trading room.
There's one thing I'd like to add that most of the noise in a computer comes from the cooling fan... Have you checked that.
IBM has a collection of wav files for some hard drive problems that make noises. Enjoy! http://ssddom01.storage.ibm.com/hdd...4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c?OpenDocument