Many people have heard the sound, that goosebumps the arms of the “Poweruser-Community”… It’s a sort of clicking or Phaser noise, that screeches from the Harddrive. Here are some examples:
Mostly a clicking noise indicates the Read/Write arm moving towards the outside of the platter and then beeing repelled by some kind of hardware failure, causing the arm to be shot back to the center of the platter. Because this movement is perpetual, the Drive does not get any chance to read and/or write.
The Phasing noise is caused by the motor, which, when the hard drive is healthy, commonly spins the platters at 5400- 7200 revolutions per minute (rpm). When the read/write arm is stuck to the platter, the motor doesn’t have the opportunity to spin. The motor tries to shake the blockage off by rapidly changing the spinning direction. The hard drive tries to do this 3 times until it starts to do the phasing noise to indicate the operator that there is something wrong with the motor.
In both cases, recovery IS POSSIBLE. Important is, not to open or further damage the device by smashing, shoving, kicking, hitting, lighting it on fire, hammer or sitting on the drive. A company called drive savers is specialized in recovering a plethora of Hard Drives, but because a professional recovery is very expensive, i would like to refer to a earlier article about recoveries. Always back up!
Of course, failure sounds vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, so you click (if you unfortunately have one) may sound different. This should you give you a idea of the sound though…
Have a nice day,
Nik (computec)
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