Cracking noise on a new internal hard drive when turning on system

[Sukuni]

I have three hard drives. Two are connected in the system among which one is of 180GB and it is quiet old. Second one is 500GB that was bought a few months ago and a new one is 1TB. I am having lot of videos in the system and the space is used up really fast due to HD video quality. So I thought getting a 1TB space would be more than enough. But here there is some issue. When I turn on the system there is a cracking noise in the system. I had opened the case and tried to check and still I can find the noise. I hope the drive is not faulty. Should I continue or get it replaced.

[Lincon_W.D]

Hi Sukuni,
Based on your post, as you have opened the case, may I know the sound is coming from the HDD or is it coming from the other parts of the computer? Second thing, are you able to access the drive? If yes, then the drive should be normal.
To make sure that the sound is normal or abnormal you may visit the link below:

{http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nO2SB2}

You may also perform the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics test on the drive to test it. Here's the link below :

{http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=GwV64x}

This will also help you to determine that the drive is working properly.

Hope it help you .

[Roey]

It is good if you can get it replaced. It might not work well after few months and you will loose your data also. As far as I know new hard drive does not produce any kind of noise. If there is then it means it is having some kind of loose component. And it can crash the drive. Just get it replaced and get a new one. There are many third party software based testing tools. But they wont give you accurate information. It is always good to keep multiple backup of your system. Incase if something happens the drive crashes you still have chance to recover it from other location.

[Naq]

I had faced issue like this before. Such cracking sound usually comes in old hard drive not in new one. New drives are not having such. You have to contact the seller and show him the issue. And get a replacement for the same. According to me it would not be safe to keep your files on the drive that is mucking such noise. I had tested a drive before which was a IDE one. I have to manually turn on and off the pc as the drive was not able to format through Windows XP drive. It was also making the same kind of cracking noise and after a while it just stopped working. So better replace it.

[Lisa Boney]

Cracking sound is not a good sign. It can lead to serious hardware issue later on. It is best to get it replaced. If still you want to use it for sometime then try to configure cloud setup on your system. Through cloud you can have backup on different places. Cloud is the best way today to keep your files. There are so many cloud storage today that provide you limited about of free space. And you can upgrade that by paying a little amount. I think the best one today is Google Drive. This one provides you easy upload and file sharing. It is also faster and cheaper.