WD HDD Soft Chirping Noise - Impending Disaster or Normal Minor Problem?

[Nukedrabbit95]

So last night I noticed my hard drive started making a soft chirping noise when writing. It's a Western Digital WDC-WD10EZEX, the same hard drive that originally came with my desktop. I currently have two of these things in my machine, one of which is a replacement for the original drive which failed after about two years, and the other which was given to me by a friend.

[URL="https://www.mediafire.com/file/428xlvj1dl69c22/hdd_chirping.wav"]Here's a recording of the sound.[/URL]

Now first, a story.

The replacement drive was originally my main drive with an 8.1 installation on it. Recently I switched motherboard and cpu from an AMD FX-6300 to a 7700k. My 8.1 install hated the switch and would consistently blue screen 15 seconds after starting. I enlisted the help of a friend who gave me a spare drive he had lying around with a pretty clean windows 10 installation on it. We put it in and it ran fine, and that drive ended up becoming my main os drive, with the old one containing all of my programs.

However, not long afterwards the replacement drive started making a slight chirping noise when writing. Being terrified of any kind of hard drive noise, I panicked and moved all of my stuff off of the drive and stopped using it. Now, months later, the friends drive has started making the exact same chirping noise, and I've run out of free drives to move my shit over to.

The thing is, I've run chkdsk and WD data lifeguard on both drives, and neither program has reported any problems whatsoever on either drive. There are no performance issues or read/write errors, both drives run as good as they ever did. When my original drive was failing, I was getting errors and issues way before it started making any kind of noise. (And even then, it wasn't the same noise.)

So my question is, is this kind of shit normal, and am I relatively safe for the time being? The replacement drive still works just fine despite still making that noise and it's been months. (Granted, I'm no longer running my os from it.) It's a very soft noise, too, you can barely hear it over the fans. I could only get it recorded as clearly as I did by opening the case and putting my microphone right next to the drive, and even then it's still kind of subtle.

Bottom line, do I really need to run out and get a new drive right now?

[Snek]

HDDs making soft noises is perfectly normal, but if you don't want to lose your stuff, you gotta have a backup anyway.

They can and will fail completely out of the blue regardless of whether there's any warning or not.

[daigennki]

Judging by the sound you provided in the link, it sounds normal to me. If you are still worried though I suggest using [url=https://crystalmark.info/?lang=en]CrystalDiskInfo[/url]. And of course, is not bad to backup. I like to use File History to backup to my external HDD, useful for when you accidentally screwed up a specific file too.

[FFStudios]

That sort of sound seems normal, as the others have said. Some hard drives are louder than others, and the noise can get louder as the dampener starts to wear inside the drive. This isn't necessarily always indicative of a potential failure, but running a SMART test and a sector test is just about the best thing you could do at this point.

Oh, and make backups of important data NOW. You can never be too sure when a drive is going to permanently give up the ghost.