Hard drive noises

[Giles Orr]

I have an old laptop (very old! 550MHz Celeron) that functions as my
alarm clock.  I'd use one of the Atom "nettops," but why bother while
this thing still works?  And that's the question of the day, is it
still working ...

The 20(?)GB HD in it died a couple months ago with a horrible death
rattle - although as I think I mentioned, a freezer pack did wonders
for getting the data off before it went into complete rigor mortis.  I
replaced that drive with a 40GB HD I had lying around.  It made
interesting ticking noises every sixty seconds or so - sort of a fast
double-tick-slash-clunk noise.  Not loud, but definitely mildly
worrisome.  And it did that for a month and a half until I replaced it
with a brand new 320GB drive.  Where this all gets interesting to me
is when I hooked up the new drive to my desktop with an external USB
adapter that evidently didn't supply enough power: the new drive made
a series of horrible clonking noises until I unplugged it.  I added
external power and suddenly the drive was fine.  Transferred the data
I needed, stuffed the drive into the old laptop.

The new drive "ticks" every once in a while, pretty regularly.  Very
quietly, but not when there's any apparent drive activity.  So I've
come up with a theory that the laptop power supply is producing a very
slight under-voltage that could, perhaps, be damaging the drives over
time.  So is this possible?  Likely?  And is there any way to check?
Any alternate theories?  Or am I just paranoid?  Thanks!

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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