Clicking Hard Drive | Tierra Data Recovery

hard drive clicking

What should you do if you have a hard drive clicking? Many people will ignore it as long as their computer continues to boot (even if it takes a try or two) and they can still get on with their work (even if it seems a bit slower). But you’re dealing with a potential data disaster which might need hard drive recovery.

Your Hard Drive is a Stand-Alone Computer

A hard drive is effectively a stand-alone computer inside your computer. It provides input and output to your computer’s processor in response to user demand, and takes care of the heavy lifting internally to meet that demand.

A request from you to your computer to (say) open the contents of a Word file will result in low-level commands from the computer’s processor to the hard drive, which internally will perform thousands of operations to locate, fetch and retry (more times than you would believe) each fragment of the data.

Even while you are staring at the screen considering changing a sentence, your hard drive is responding to the requests passed on by the operating system from the dozens of programs resident on your modern computer.

You may have a desktop search tool (and not realise it) which constantly scans the hard drive for new content during “quiet” periods. You may have an automatic disk defragmenter chugging away, or an operating system with built-in disk optimisation. You might be running automatic shared folders, synchronised with a remote computer. All of these add to the massive amount of work performed inside the hard drive.

What Causes Hard Drive Clicking?

So what causes hard drive clicking noises and why should you act on it? It’s a time-bomb and you don’t know how long the countdown is. Your hard drive contains between one and four mirror finish double-sided silver disks spinning at 5-7,000 rotations per minute with between one and eight read heads floating above the platters on minuscule beds of air while moving in perfect synchronisation laterally across the spinning disk surface – almost like surfers skimming the foam of a 1,000 foot wave.

Hard drives are amazing pieces of engineering – the zenith of the application of positive feed-back loops for unbelievable accuracy and robustness in widespread mechanical devices. But when the internal zen is disturbed, the feed-back starts to switch the other way. Self-correction fails as the internal mechanics degrade, ending in dramatic failure.

Clicks are a sign of internal hard drive failure – if your computer still boots and you can still see your data, you have a last chance to copy out your critical data. You might even have enough time to clone the whole content. But your hard drive is on an accelerated path to self-destruction.

Your Hard Drive Clicking Mission Starts Here

So your mission (should you choose to accept): if you have a hard drive clicking, ask your IT department pull out your critical data and replace the drive and if they can’t, call us for data recovery services before it’s too late.

You’ll find our pricing here, you can complete our enquiry form on the left, you can email us or simply call us at local-rate from anywhere in the UK on 0845 094 0027. If you are calling from a mobile, you might find it even easier to call us on 0131 663 4137. Call us and we’ll get started on your clicking hard drive.