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So my laptop's hard drive always had this soft, buzzing, clicking sound when the hard drive was working. The sound was there when the laptop was brand new and it was always present during the years, so I considered it normal. I had no problem with the hard disk.

Recently I noticed the sound was gone. My laptop is 4 or 5 years old now and I have no problem with it, but apparently the hard disk does not produce the above mentioned sounds anymore. And it still has no problems I know of.

My question is: is the lack of sound indicates some change in the HD? Should I be on the lookout for possible problems.

I know it is a sign of a bad problem if the hard disk suddenly becomes noisy, producing loud clicking sounds and stuff, but in this case it's the other way around. It was noisy before and now it's completely silent.

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  • My guess it's nothing.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 23, 2014 at 19:45
  • Get a program like HDD Health, that will tell if there are problems with the disk.
    – cliff2310
    Sep 23, 2014 at 22:36
  • @cliff2310 isn't the builtin windows 7 disk checker enough? I guess it should also find problems if there are any.
    – Tom
    Sep 24, 2014 at 5:55
  • @Tom HDD Health and others like it, tell you when something is not right. It will inform you when the drive(s) are over temperature and other conditions. It will also tell you when a drive is starting to fail. It runs all the time so it will inform you when something goes wrong. Its also free.
    – cliff2310
    Sep 24, 2014 at 22:58
  • It could be a software update. Many hard drives have power saving, performance and noise level options, and some software may have changed that value. For example, spinning the disk faster is noisier. Moving the heads faster is also noisier. Both of those take more power too, so a power-saving feature may also make a driver quieter.
    – Zan Lynx
    May 2, 2016 at 16:42

1 Answer 1

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Noise is made by parts rubbing against each other, lack of noise means parts are no longer rubbing against each other, which is usually a good thing. However, it is not a bad idea to be especially cautious as it is odd for noise to decrease on an older drive, and more common for noise to increase.

If the system were running noticeably slower, crashing frequently, or reporting errors with the hard drive, I'd worry a bit more. If you are not experiencing any of these other symptoms though, I wouldn't concern myself too much.

As with any computer system: Make sure you have good backups.

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  • I have no crashes, but I notice some slowness occasionally. I'll do a disk check to make sure there are no errors, but windows 7 wants a reboot to do it (because the drive is used) which is inconvenient, because I usually hibernate.
    – Tom
    Sep 23, 2014 at 19:59

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