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High pitched whine from external hard drive

12 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
12 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
11 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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grandms
11 years ago
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
11 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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