Windows 10: Intermittent HDD Stall/Noise Which Can Be Fixed By Win10 Reinstall

I have a Windows 10 Home desktop with a SSD containing my Win10 installation and an internal HDD which I use for applications/storage.

About a year ago, my HDD (Toshiba) started making noises and stalling. The behavior would make a buzz as if the disk was spinning up, run for a while, and then make a loud pop/click after about 30 seconds or so (the interval was not consistent). Often any active application running on the disk at the time would stall during the initial buzz. At the time, I formatted and restored the data on the HDD, but that did not help. Finally, I just did a complete reinstall of Windows 10 on my SSD (while leaving the HDD untouched), and the HDD behaved properly for about a year after that. However, within the past few weeks this problem popped up again. Thinking it may just be a problem with the HDD, I went out and bought a new HDD (Seagate) to replace the existing one, and after cloning the old disk to the new one I found that the new HDD is behaving similarly. (The new drive isn't as noisy as the other one, but it still makes some buzzing noises which are accompanied by stalling.)

I have tried to the following in order to resolve this issue:

1. Set the power profile to High Performance and change "Turn Hard Disk Off After" from 20 minutes to 0 minutes. (Which I understand should disable this feature entirely.) Didn't help.

2. Run chkdsk to look for errors. There weren't any.

3. Check for HDD driver updates. Didn't find any for either the old or the new HDD.

4. Try to disable Advanced Power Management for the HDD. It was off (unsupported?) on the first drive. I disabled it on the second one, but it seemed to re-enable itself (?!?!) after I turned it off using CrystalDiskInfo. Regardless, disabling APM didn't seem to help.

5. Look at the SMART stats for the drive to see if there is anything that grabs my attention. Didn't see anything notable (to me at least).

6. As mentioned above, reinstalling Windows 10 on my SSD resolved the issue last time. I would like to avoid having to do that again.

Given that a Windows reinstall fixed the issue, I think that this is a Windows problem of some sort. It sort of seems like it may be related to power management or driver settings. Another thing to note is that this is a Dell prebuilt computer, and I would not rule out the possibility that the pre-installed Dell SupportAssist application could have "optimized" some Windows settings for me. (I have uninstalled SupportAssist at this point.) However, I do not know what other HDD settings are available to tweak. Anyone have any suggestions on other things to try?

Thanks.

:)

 

Reinstalling Win10 on new HDD

I upgraded to Windows 10 for free. I'm happy with it, however my HDD is failing. Strange noises, random BSODs, sometimes fine. I am using the media creation tool now, whilst my rig is stable, to create a USB installer.

Question: When I'm installing Win10 it'll ask me for product key, which I've read in other threads I should skip. How will Win10 then determine my product key, version etc?

 

unlock hdd

 

About HDD Noise

I got these type of noises from where my HDD located (HDD No:- WD10JPVX-60JC3T0). Does anyone have any idea what type of sound is this? (like, clicking noise, head stuck noise, torn head noise, platter scratch noise, etc)

When the system boots up:-

In the time of shutting down:-

When opening google chrome:-

When the system boots up or in time of playing games or running a large program like Photoshop or HDD working at 100% sound is higher than usual. Another thing I noticed, when I make a clean install of Windows 10 (no program installed on the system, 'there
is no such sound or you can say very much less sound'), and then I started installing applications these types of sound arises.

Can anyone tell me that my HDD is damaged or not?