There are three major reasons for a Western Digital hard drive to start clicking. Modern disk drives are complex devices and while usually last three or more years they do fail at some point. Like others, Western Digital hard drives have seen great improvements in recent years achieving greater speeds and storage capacities. Today these are made in variety of shapes and sizes and for less money. Hard drives are prone to vibration and to produce a sound way different than the rest of computer components. However, continuous clicking noise coming from your internal or portable Western Digital drive suggesting a malfunction.
If you start hearing noises that you’ve never heard before — like clicking, grinding, vibrations, or squealing — your hard drive may be failing.
Continuous clicking noise often results from the defective disk’s HSA to power related issues to internal software to malfunctioned part or other hardware problems. For professional data recovery engineer data from a clicking Western Digital hard drive can usually be recovered.
My 2TB WD Book Hard Drive makes clicking noise for about 30 seconds. Then it turns off for a bit but then turns back on with more clicking noise. Please help I need my photos!
Western Digital Drives Clicking Causes
Since a hard drive has moving parts and during its lifetime these parts will undergo normal wear and tear, resulting in a eventual malfunction.
- Power Related Issues – Insufficient Power could lead to creating noise on the hard drive while power surges can damage the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) – electronic component and/or the HSA (Head Stack Assembly) – heads, actuator and “pre-amplifier”.
- Issues with Service Area – “Service Area” is a zone of a disk which stores manufacturer specific data required for hard drive operation. Like any other data it can get corrupted/damaged resulting in inability to interpret correct information from/to the drive.
- Hardware failures – As we mentioned above modern hard drives are fabricated of parts designed to be as perfect as they can possibly be but over time wear and tear cause components such as Heads, Spindle motor or even Electronic components to fail.
However, over time elements, wear and tear and components such as R/W Heads, Spindle motor or even Electronic components all of which can fail. Misalignment, weak or malfunctioned heads are most common causes of such behavior usually when hard drive is dropped or handled roughly.
DIY Data Recovery for Western Digital Hard Drive
We do not recommend DIY method. – Read about unrecoverable drives.
In most cases, clicking coming from a WD hard drive shows serious malfunction with the drive. In order to repair read/write heads clean room is required. If opened in room environment, the drive platters will be exposed to elements making the recovery much harder or impossible.
Clicking Western Digital hard drive is very rarely ever caused by a controller board. Replacing a PCB may only work for an electrical failure, especially very old hard drives but on newer drives it can cause more problems and require more than just swapping out the board.
Using data recovery software to obtain the files and transfer them to a new drive will not work and continuing to operate the drive can cause platter damage and only make WD data recovery more difficult, or impossible.
Clicking WD Hard Drive Data Recovery
Data Analyzers treats hundreds of devices including: Western Digital internal, portable and external hard disk drives each month using our specialized tools to safely work with sensitive data. Our lab offers free media evaluations for standard Western Digital data recovery, and if your device fails unexpectedly, we can quickly provide you with a price and turnaround estimate without risking accidental platter damage.
