My PC (5-6 year old Dell Dimension) has started to do random beeps, really high pitched. Seems to be when the D:\ drive is accessed. This HD is a seperate one to the drive with the OS on it.
I suspect the hard drive might be on the verge of failing, however I wasn't aware they made a last throws of death sound?

 

Dell have a diagnostics test in teh f12 menu on boot up, that checks the state of the drives. I've never known a drive itself to beep. the PC may beep if it cant access a file its trying to fin though.

 

Never, ever heard of a hard drive making a beeping sound. And I work in fixing PC's... very strange that though. Hard to say what it is without having a proper look.. are the files on the second hard drive slow to access?

The beeping will be from the computer itself, they have a little beeper inside that beeps when there's something wrong or to alert you of something. What operating system are you running?

 

I've had an external hard-drive make what sounded very much like random high pitched beeping noises (about every 5 mins or so) - that bugged the hell out of me until the PSU for it failed and it stopped working (which stopped the beeps!).

As they don't have speakers as such and have no way of making a traditional beeping noise, I'd suggest it was some form of electromechanical noise - but god knows what!

Anyway - Yes, I've had a hard drive make beeping noises before it effectively failed.

DN

 

Hey Matt,
is the sound definitely coming from the HD and not something else due to interference?

If it is coming from the HD, it might be the capacitors. Some start doing it when they are about to fail or they will continue to work fine for a long time afterwards...

Backup your data....

 

Long time ago I had a had a IBM drive do this. On a brand new built PC.

It drove me mad, it seemed to happen when the system was idle. It went to and from the shop loads of times and they never noticed it.

Until out of desp[eration I cracked it open and I removed/disabled every item from the system so all that was left was the main hard drive and motherboard. The board had an external speaker, and that was also removed. Low and behold, it STILL beeped.

I pulled the HD stuck in another one off another system. Quiet. At last!

Shop wouldn't belive me when I told them. I said try it, leave for 15 mins at idle and it'll do it, then every five minutes thereafter. They came back to me the next day with some baffled humble pie.

Basically what was happening is the drive's read/write heads would park off the platter (quite normal, they usually make a minor click noise when this happens). But for some reason the drive would 'try ' to park the heads again even though they were already parked....this made a beeping noise which was actually the noise of the head coil under load and head vibrating against the end stop because it could move no further.

If someone had told me, I wouldn't have belived them either, but having heard it myself I can say a hard drive really can 'beep' LOL.

 

Oh, and you can turn hard drives into speakers so they cam make whatever noise you want!.....you wire read/write head movement coils up to an amplifer and away you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4jQNa_9sY

 

And for those in disbelief I give ye a beeping (dead) hard drive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gphls...eature=related

Mine beeped but appeared work perfectly fine

 

Looking at the last vid, i'd be more concerned about escaping properly lol than faffing around with a hard drive.

Or was he tied up for playing with the hard drive ?

Mart