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I have a total of 5 drives, 4 internal, 1 external. My system drive (C) is a solid state drive, the rest are HDDs. The external drive and the internal SSD are both fine. However, when I access (read, write) any of the other 3 internal hard drives, I hear a beeping sound coming from what I think is the computer's internal speaker. The beeping sound is more frequent when the activity is more resource intensive like copying files or playing a movie (as opposed to just browsing folders in Windows Explorer). Any time the computer makes the beeping sound, the HDD activity appears to pause for 2-3 seconds and then everything continues as normal. So let's say I'm copying a 2GB file from one HDD to another, I will hear the beeping sound maybe 10 to 20 times during the copying process and every time the progress bar will stop (and the time remaining estimate will increase). Then after a couple of seconds, the process will continue.

Since the problem is affecting 3 hard drives simultaneously, I can't assume that the problem is faulty hard drives. Can it be the motherboard, physical connections, or the operating system (Windows 7 Pro 64 bit)?

The computer is a few years old (Windows 7 era) and has 8 GB of RAM. The problem began about 2 weeks ago.

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  • You'll do well to confirm if the sound is really coming from the speaker. Either disconnect it or put tape over it an edit your question with an update.
    – I say Reinstate Monica
    Commented Oct 29, 2017 at 1:56
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    Are the 3 hard drives in RAID? What brand hard drives are they? Seagates? Seagates had horrible issues with "beeping" sounds coming from the physical hard drive. Additionally, those sounds, being that they coincide with pauses in drive access probably indicate the drives are making the noise. It could be a power loss (are they all on the same power line from the power supply?) or it could be some kind of mechanics going bad. I'd really lean towards it being the hard drive making the sound - you should worry. It may just be one drive going bad that is affecting access on the others.
    – Appleoddity
    Commented Oct 29, 2017 at 4:14
  • @Appleoddity No, the drives are not in RAID. Two are 2GB Seagate drives, one is a 1GB WD. The same sound comes from the computer regardless of which hard drive I'm accessing and I believe WD hard drives don't have built-in speakers. I have backed up all important data but I must say I have a really hard time imagining how 3 hard drives can be failing at the same time. Plus, I have used software to verify their health. I don't know what else to do.
    – A.B.
    Commented Oct 29, 2017 at 5:36
  • I can't say where the sound is coming from because I can't hear the sound you are hearing. A failing hard drive can "squeak" or "chirp" and if that is what you are hearing then a drive is going bad. Nobody suggested all 3 drives are going bad, that wouldn't make any sense. One of your drives is going bad, and somehow it's affecting the rest of them. It could be any of them, but it's 90% or better one of the Seagates. They are terrible drives that literally fail at 10x the rate of any other drive. So, start looking there. What about the power connection I suggested?
    – Appleoddity
    Commented Oct 29, 2017 at 6:29
  • Possibility. Just check if your power supply is still sufficient for that herd of drives. PSU do degrade over time, and a marginal rail voltage could trigger the MB speaker.
    – PcMan
    Commented Aug 10, 2021 at 21:06

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