Strange noise from HDD (Seagate U Series, 20GB)

[schwarzenneger]

I occasionally hear a strange noise from my hard drive (Seagate U Series, 20GB). It sounds like metal rubbing on another sharp metallic edge, very faint noise but audible (it is difficult to explain in words though). Some times the noise is made when system is powered on and the mobo manufacturer's logo (AMI) is displayed (before the harddrive is detected); when the system is running; noise is sometimes made regardless of whether there is a disk activity or not (the hdd activity light remains off when noise is made, unless a disk activity like file copy is in progress).

I downloaded and ran the sea tools from their website and they reported no problems. The hard disk is working fine; i just don't like the noise. Any clue?

[Sterling_Aug]

Save up some oney and replace the drive as soon as you can. It is ready to fail at any time now.

[ukulele]

I have a Seagate drive that is pretty noisy compared to a Maxtor but it's a light chatter. More like the old drives all had, just faster. I was surpised as I expected it to be wisper quite. I has worked flawlessly for a month now so I'm not going to loose any sleep over it. One thing you can check if the drive diagnostics is good is the mounting screws. If they are loose or missing the torque on the housing could actually tweak the drive according to the manufacturer.

[wakeforce]

Mine does the same thing each time I power my cpu on, but doesn't do it when working with it. It's been doing this for quite some time now...