My new hard drives started chirping noticeably louder than usual today.

Hello,



At least one of my two fairly-new hard drives started to be much louder and more annoying only just today, having louder chirping than before, calming down only for a couple of seconds occasionally. Is there anything I can do to keep the noise down? Or any explanation why it became louder?



Both hard drives are:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB Hard Drive - 7200, 8MB, Serial ATA-300

I bought them only about 3 months ago, brand new, off newegg.com, I believe. No changes to the system recently or to the programs or processing power I used today.



Thanks

too much data ?...disk cleanup or defrag ?
have you tried the above ?

it has 65GB free, and i ran the defrag, but some days it's quiet, like yesterday, and other days, like today, it's loud

All I could tell you is back up everything on the drive you want and keep a check on it, if not and its just 3 months old, back it up and RMA it to Seagate.

'Chirping' or 'clicking'? Chirping or vibrating may simply mean it isn't screwed in to the bay tightly enough. Check your screws, tighten if necessary, then see if problem is still there.

Clicking, however, either constant or intermittent, means defective drive, and you need to back up your data, format, them RMA.