Hard Drive making scratching noise

[RoyalistGamer]

Hello,

I recently got the Optimus VII laptop from PCSpecialist and realised its hard drive makes a scratching noise for a second every five minutes or so. The hard drive is installed in a Hard Drive Optical Bay Caddy. My Windows 10 is running of an SSD. Is this scratching noise normal or not?

Kind Regards,

RoyalistGamer

 

[GeorgeHillier]

Depends what your idea of "scratching" is, a hard drive, especially a laptop one does make noise and can be a low murmur or could be higher pitch as well depending what it's doing, but can't really say unless we were to hear it

 

[Stephen M]

Does not sound normal, probably worth talking to someone at PCS support.

 

[ubuysa]

The easiest way to find out is to check the SMART data stored in the HDD. That contains all the failure counts etc. Google "HDD SMART data utility" and pick on you fancy to see the full SMART data in the drive.

You can however get a quick idea of the state of the drive with a couple of WIndows commands. Open up a command prompt an enter the following commands:

wmic
diskdrive get status

If you see Status followed by a string of OK responses your disk is fine. For example, this is what happens when I run these commands:

C:\Users\My Name>wmic
wmic:root\cli>diskdrive get status
Status
OK
OK
OK
OK

wmic:root\cli>

 

[msar]

Are there any applications running in the background? That could be the auto-save feature of an application if it is always every five minutes. Perhaps there a virus scanner running? When there is a continuous whining, grating or grinding sound, that's a bearing of the HDD about to fail.

 

[RoyalistGamer]

I think it might be nothing serious as its more of a click then a scratch. Its happening less frequently now when I changed the power settings to never turn off the hard drive. Also, to give you a better understanding of how it sounds, its like a quiet mouse click which only clicks once. I have ran the 'wmic diskdrive get status' command in command prompt for both my hard drive and my SSD and its say both are OK. Thank you to all those who replied to help.

 

[ubuysa]

I think it might be nothing serious as its more of a click then a scratch. Its happening less frequently now when I changed the power settings to never turn off the hard drive. Also, to give you a better understanding of how it sounds, its like a quiet mouse click which only clicks once. I have ran the 'wmic diskdrive get status' command in command prompt for both my hard drive and my SSD and its say both are OK. Thank you to all those who replied to help.

In that case don't worry about it. Some drives are nosier than others. If you take regular backups (as you should ) then if the drive does fail it won't be catastrophic.