Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001 hard drive making weird noise

In my system my hard drive is making a weird noise. It looks like something is stucked inside. It is a 1 year old Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001 hard drive. The system performance is also quiet slow. I am planing to format this and install everything back again from scratch. But to some extent it does not looks to be safe here. I hope the drive does not fails. Is there a way to stop that noise or simply find what is the exact issue. I had opened the case and checked the cable which are proper. The voice from the hard drive. Can I open it.

Do not do that. If you open the drive you will damage it. This kind of noise only comes when the head crashes. Try to backup your data as soon as possible or else there can be serious problem later on. This kind of issue only appear if the drive is dropped.

Noise does not means your drive is going to die. There can be different possibilities also. There are different kind of noise which can tell you about the cause. First if there is a humming noise then it means your drive is spinning really fast. There can be some application in the background which is constantly using the drive and cause the noise issue. You can go with a fresh windows installation to reduce that. But if there is a crackling type of noise then it is more complicated. There can be some kind of damage component in the system causing the issue. You have to carry the drive to the service center. There are some nice hard drive testing utility that can give you information about bad sectors. But I am not really sure about the hardware fault. They can give you more information about the performance and output. Crackling sound are cause of damage head or splatter. Which is really severe. It is necessary that you must backup your data as mentioned above before going for repair.

My 500GB drive stopped working in the same manner. I was cleaning my system when I accidentally dropped it. One partition was lost instantly but fortunately it was working. Some 100GB of space is useless in my drive now which is neither detected nor recoverable. After a couple of month the entire drive stopped working.

Try some diagnostic software. I am listing some of them here which are free and easily available. They can give you right information about your drive status. You can just get a prediction about the drive status so that you can take precautionary measures before it gets damage completely. The best one here is Seatools. It is by Seagate. I am also using the same. It comes in two edition. One is dos where you get a black command line utility and second one is Windows where you get a gui based interface to test your drive. It can give you basic and advance test as well. Just download and install this in your system and run a complete scan here. This will be simply more helpful in dealing with the problem you are facing. If there is any error you receive through the drive you must keep a replacement ready. Another one is a tiny utility called as HDDScan. This is a nice diagnostic tool that tells you about the drive status. For using this you will need to ensure that SMART is enabled from the bios.

I had used Drive Fitness Test software. I do not think this kind of tools are capable of telling about drive failure. They just give you listing about drive bad sectors only. While any hardware failure inside the HDD is impossible for any tool to predict.

You said that there is a sound in the hard drive. Well to frank it is not good. If the sound is of rotating platter then it means your drive is working hard. You will have to turn of some set of software's which you are not using at all. The only utility that I thin will work well here is HDD Scan. It can give you a short overview about your drive status and its output. Almost all tools like this only help you to locate bad sectors. Nothing else.If you see any warning sign about damage platters or bad sectors it is essential that you must backup your data instantly. Or else there can be severe results in future. You will not get replacement if the drive is damage accidentally. This is not covered under the warranty stuff. One thing you can do here. You can use it as secondary storage until it is working.

Hard drive's also get damage due to shock or power failure. That is one of the most common cause which many people ignore. That is why it is necessary that you must keep your data at different places. This has happened to me two times.