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High pitched whine from external hard drive

14 years ago

I have a Kingwin external hard drive probably six years old used for photo and document back up. Yesterday it started emitting a very high pitched whine so I unplugged it. I assume it is dying. The sound was not tolerable.

I need to buy a new one but do not need so much storage nor to pay a hundred bucks.

What is a reliable brand and where can I find a smaller cheaper one? I was reading reviews on Amazon but they all complain of failure and they were all bigger and more expensive than I need.

My desktop is only 200 gb hard drive and less than 25% full.

Thanks

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Comments (4)

owbist
14 years ago
It really does not matter that you only need a small drive, they are gone. Replaced by larger volume drives, planned obsolescence.

You could remove the existing drive from your enclosure and replace it with a new drive but the savings seem minimal. Then you have the aggravation of doing the task. You would need to determine if the current drive is 2.5 or 3.5 inches and whether it is SATA or PATA (IDE 40 or 80 ribbon data cable) As the drive appears to have failed there is no loss to your attempting to remove the drive if you feel so inclined.

Tigerdirect has hard drives from $70 but they also have complete external drives for $90 so you would be saving $20 for a DIY job.
mikie_gw
14 years ago
I just bought a 2.5 sata usb hard drive external enclosure from newegg.. under $11 delivered.

My old laptop power controler has died so pulled its hard drive out and put it in that enclosure. I'm impressed its at least full usb20 fast. & works so well. Makes an image to remote hdd same the same amount of time as it makes one to the local main hard drive.

Gave me Plenty of room for new laptop drive images, plus all my old files became back available. Small wow.
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thanks for the comments pkponder and owbist. I posted replies to the other original post, in which I said something related to what owbist is saying here. Basically, acronis support also suggested that I create a bootable CD to restart from. After hours trying to understand how to do that, I got Acronis started from the CD only to have it complain about reading some acronis files all over again (different error msg though). The msgs made it sound as if the file was maybe corrupted or something. This being a new external drive, I seriously doubt there is any file corruption or bas spot on the external disk itself. I noticed how the letter assigned to the external drive changes when I am in normal Windows Explorer Mode & Acronis off the bootable CD. In Windows Explorer, the external Drive is letter J. When messing with Acronis off the CD, it is I but the internal records for the backups kept by Acronis display the file names with letter J. Odd. owbist, caution! I originally thought I was in high heaven when acronis was backing up things regularly but, after this bad taste trying to do a restore, you may want to ck to see if trying to restore is possible or not for you. So frustrating since it did exactly this same restore request last month like a champ! Luis PS - My apologies for not replying sooner. One of the effects of what screwed me up is not being able to start Outlook. Some file called outlook.pst is missing so I have not been able to check my emails for a few weeks...
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The documents and pictures are (mostly) still there. When something is deleted, all that really occurs is that the first letter of the file name is dropped and the file becomes "invisible." You should be able to recover most or all of the files with the right software. However, if you keep using your computer, you stand a good chance of over-writing the files because the space they occupy is "free space" as far as the computer is concerned. My advice: use another computer and do a Google search for "recover deleted files" to find some software that works for you. It's been several year since I've had to hunt for deleted files, so I'm not up-to-date on what's out there. If possible, install the software you select on the new drive so that you don't over-write more accidentally deleted files when you install the new software.
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grandms
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If your storage needs are small, why not consider a solid state flash drive? They are available in sizes up to 32GB, or maybe even larger. Since there are no moving parts, it seems there would be less to go wrong. I have all my pictures and music on a 8GB flash drive in addition to the complete backups I maintain on two different external drives.
mikie_gw
14 years ago
fwiw.. think microsoft win7, just read recently, recommends 200gb or larger for remote back up drive. So as to have room for several automatic backup sets & a couple or more full drive images... for the average joe home.

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