Loud Hard Drive

Just was over at a clients (business) who was complaining about the noise one of their computers was making. I was skeptical but when I got there, but I did notice that the computer was making an unusual high pitched "whirring" sound. It only took a minute to figure out it was the hard drive - a samsung. Whenever I do an upgrade for this client, we keep the old PCs and and working parts there so they don't have a lot of down time. I ghosted the noisy drive to a seagate and swapped the drive out. Now it's nice and quite.

They said that it wasn't always that loud but I don't know if that's possible. Even though it was annoyingly loud, it didn't sound defective to me. . . Normal powered up sounds, just a lot higher pitched. The drive was also operating flawlessly.

Anyone ever experienced anything similar? I wonder if the drive is actually going bad? If not any tips on dampening the volume a little bit if it ends up in another system?

I wouldnt use it for anything vital. Most of my experience is with WD and they get louder as they age it seems, but I've had more than a few get so loud they can be heard from under the desk, and then begin to give write errors or just not be recognised on boot one day. If they got 3 years out of the drive it's done its service. You might wanna check the warranty on it, wd gives you 3 yrs, i steer clear of spamsung......

My boss's laptop HD was doing something similar, so I figured it was about to die. Ordered a replacement drive, but then the noise stopped before the new HD arrived! It's still going one month later and the noise has NOT come back.