You recently dropped, bumped, improperly ejected or mishandled your hard drive and now it’s making clicking sounds. Before you continue reading this post or do anything, PLEASE POWER DOWN the drive IMMEDIATELY and safely put it aside.

In order to understand this clicking sound, we first need to understand how a hard drive works. Inside the hard drive, we have platters (where the data is stored) and read/write heads (similar to needles of a record player). When we power on a hard drive, if we listed carefully we can hear the platters start spinning first, once they reach their full speed, the read/write heads come off of their parking ramps, hovering nanometers over the platters and start reading/writing the data from/to the platters. The heads never ever touch the platters. When the drive is safely powered down, the read/write heads go back on their parking ramps and only once they are safely off of the platters will the platters stop spinning.

So now that we have a basic understanding of how the drive works, we can try to envision what happens when we drop/bump/improperly eject a hard drive when its powered on. The heads are moving back and forth (nanometers about the platters), reading and writing to the platters as they are spinning at 7,000 rpm’s. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the drive gets bumped/dropped/improperly ejected. The head (s) touch the platter (s) for split second making a scratch on the platters. As you try to access the data that is stored on that area where the scratch is, the head is becoming more damaged as its taking on pieces of shrapnel from the scratch. After multiple attempts to read with the damaged heads, the head eventually gives up and loses its ability to read and starts going back and forth over the platters hitting the middle of the disc, thus causing that clicking sound.

Once you hear the drive is clicking, IF the data is important, you should never ever try to make any attempts to recover the data yourself. Please don’t take the drive to a computer repair shop, an IT professional or a friend who is “good with computers.” We assure you, we’ve seen it all. It’s impossible for any of these people to be able to be of any help to you in this situation. Will they save you money if they could recover the data? Yes of course! But unfortunately, this is way out of their league. Every time someone powers on the drive to attempt to recover the data, they are just spreading that tiny little scratch and making it bigger, deeper and wider.

If your drive is making clicking sounds, power down the drive, safely put it aside and contact us or any other Professional Data Recovery Company. Data is extremely precious and not worth taking chances with. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by phone, text, live chat or email to answer any questions you may have.