There are a number of reasons that a hard drive may start clicking – none of them are good signs. However, some clicking hard drives are worse than others. 

Service Area Corruption
The Service Area of a hard drive is much like an OS for a computer. If there is damage in the Service Area your drive can click due to bad modules. This may require both logical and physical data recovery work.

Bad Heads
Many people assume a clicking hard drive means a head has gone bad. The heads are the magnetic parts on a hard drive which read and write on the platters. Sometimes, new drives have a bad head due to a manufacturers’ defect. This usually shows up within the first two months of using the drive.

After two years or more, heads may degrade. This causes a hard disk failure due to too many read/write cycles or, more simply put, old age.

Degraded Heads
While a new head will typically go bad all at once, causing catastrophic hard drive failure and a data recovery emergency, a degraded head due to age may read and write, or fail to do so, intermittently. Continuing to run the drive, however, can cause complete hard drive failure. . With more and more data stored in tightly condensed patterns on today’s hard drive platters, the likelihood rises that continuing to run a clicking hard drive will result in catastrophic data loss.

Clicking Hard Drive? Power Down and Contact 24 Hour Data

If your hard drive begins clicking, power down your computer and contact 24 Hour Data. A professional data recovery service can use special tools to recover your lost data, often without even opening your drive, providing a fast and affordable data recovery.