Is it normal for a hard drive to behave and sound differently in an enclosure/system?

[Marcos]

Replaced a hard drive on a laptop, its a samsung drive so i expected silence.

Once i put the laptop back together and switched it on, it is a whole lot quieter than the previous one, but theres something that doesn't sound healthy at all. Theres a constant quiet ticking, not quite clicking, it just sounds like the drive doesn't know how to operate. And it never spins down, sounds like its trying to.

So i opened the laptop back up, took the drive out and tested it on an external enclosure and it sounds perfectly healthy, no problems at all. I even shifted GBs of data to it to make it work, etc.

So now i'm confused, i listened to the laptop run without a HD and its nice and quiet, even when the fan kicks in.

So the drive is fine, the laptop is quiet, whats causing the strange workings? The strange noises and irregular quiet scratching noises etc.

Not sure how to record the sound, its just not like any other drive i've heard. Maybe its because the laptop is about 4 years old?

[Dougal]

Could it be a power supply problem? Not giving enough out due to degraded components?

[Marcos]

Hmm, perhaps the old laptop doesn't provide enough power?

But both the old laptop and new one are sold with the same power supply.

[Dougal]

What it could be is that over time the individual components in the original laptop itself could have become worn electricaly as such.

Reducing their effectiveness (for extreme cases look at blown capacitors) as caps do have a kind of life. They loose their charge and don't work as well at smoothing out the power.

[Marcos]

But wouldn't that cause the old laptop drive to also behave strangely? It works fine.

[TeePee]

We all behave and sound different when enclosed...

[Dougal]

But wouldn't that cause the old laptop drive to also behave strangely? It works fine.

Depends on the sensitivity of the components to the voltage difference.

Higher spec ones are more succeptable (sp?)

[Marcos]

Ok what i'll do is empty one of my 40GB spares and try that in the laptop, not sure what that'll prove but we'll see