Should I be concerned about significant increases in HD size?

Factual Questions
1

My laptop, normally extremely quiet and smooth, began making a lot of noise recently. I’m pretty confident that this noise is the hard-drive. It’s nothing extreme, just a sort of quiet, non-stop rumbling. Should I be concerned about this change? Most importantly, is it possibly indicitive of some sort of HD damage that could potentially cause data loss?

No other outward signs of damage or problems are present.

Thanks,
threemae

2

I assume you mean an increase in hard drive noise. There are lots of differences in the noises hard drives make. I have 3 in my system…two are super quiet, one is loud, but that one has always been loud.

IF this noise is new, and up until this point the drive was relatively silent, I’d backup your data immediately, because a significant increase in hard drive noise usually means a failure is imminent. Now, you can keep using the drive, but realize that your data could go at any moment. I’d back it up, then bring the drive in for service and have a thorough diagnostic test run. Worst case scenario, you buy a new hard drive and transfer the data from the old to the new. Hard drives are so cheap nowadays, that it’s just not worth taking the risk.

3

Alright, I’m off to do that right now.

The drive has quieted down completely and isn’t making a peep, but better safe, no?

4

Rumbling? Just as a WAG, I’d say that’s either incessant drive access, which might be more a problem with the drive being horridly fragmented, or Windows is doing crazy things with the swap file. Other scenario is impending hardware failure - the main bearing in the drive’s motor, perhaps.

Back up your data first, then have a look at the drive’s fragmentation, and any running processes that might be accessing the drive. (In Task Manager’s Processes tab, you can select I/O Reads and Writes to see what’s accessing the drive) If the drive’s noisy in absence of I/O activity, I’d bet the bearing’s dying.

5

Make sure it’s not the fan…

6

You can try and enter bios and then turn on HD s.m.a.r.t.
Most bios have it. It’s a diagnostic that runs everytime you boot up your HD. It’s designed to detect failing harddrives and it will tell you if you should back it up.

To get into bios you reboot the computer and during the post sequence hit del, f2, f4, f11 or f12. It’s usually one of those buttons anyway.