Ext. HD makes crazy noises

[wing70301]

Hey all,

I bought a Maxtor External Hard Drive a few weeks ago. Out of the box, it was perfect. Skip ahead a few weeks later and the drive makes a horrible sound as it spins up. Currently, the drive works perfectly, but that noise is a cause for worry. So for all of you in the know, is this a sign of failure? It writes, reads, and starts up fine, but that noise doesn't sound good at all. Anybody have any advice? Thanks a lot!

 

[.JahJahwarrior.]

My advice, in the form of a story:

I had the Senior Class Video stored primarily on an external drive. I would have backed it up internally, but the video was almost 200gb of video....I had all of the internal drive's data backed up on the external drive. Int. drives were 2 years old, external drive was less than a yea rold, bought specifically for this project. (ironically, summer before, my power supply blew up, frying my motherboard and both internal drives) I am literally rendering the final parts of the video and was going to be burning the dvd's in less than 24 hours. The drive had been making some funny noises on start up for about two weeks. Suddenly, the drive refused to mount. It wouldn't be read by my PC or my Mac.

6 months of work and hours and hours of finished video were down the drain.

The drive is still under warranty, but WD refuses to replace it unless I give them the defective drive. I don't want to do that because the data on the drive is still there, but the drive is broken. Some day, I might could get my data back off the drive, if WD doesn't take it and demolish it. So I'll let them test it but refuse to let them keep something that belongs to me. So they refuse to give me a new drive.

Now the internal drives are making funny noises, so I got a 320gb external drive to move all the data onto. I wouldn' ttrust any drive that makes funny noises at all. Move your data off, call the company and demand a replacement.