The page I’m going to link to has been around a while, and many tech people have probably already seen it; but for your information and edification I’ll present it again for the benefit of those who haven’t yet had the pleasure.

As we’ve already seen evidenced in the article “Hard-Drives Are Unreliable – Fact”, a hard-drive, any given hard-drive, could shuffle off this mortal coil to the great junkyard in the sky at any point in time from first usage onwards. The page linked to further on contains actual short recordings of the sounds made by various dead and dying hard-drives.

In line with all this talk of death; it might be an idea to ghost-copy your hard-drive if it’s started making noises that it didn’t used to make.

“Oh but mine’s been making funny noises for about six months now and it’s still working fine!”

- You probably have between 1 second and another six months before it fails catastrophically. Take my advice: Back up everything you want to keep on it and replace it as soon as possible; because it is already starting to fail, and it will totally fail without a doubt -  at the most inconvenient time.

Here’s the link to the page I mentioned.

Enjoy.