I'm not kidding. The last time I heard a hard drive make a noise that loud it was 1992 and I was working with my 2 MB 386. It was another Seagate, an ST-251 42-meg drive that had been dropped from about 4 feet onto its top cover (accidentally).
Except that drive worked. This one? Bricked. And it was never even dropped. BIOS doesn't even see it.
I am now extremely glad for whatever paranoid impulse made me back up all that freaking anime--and at that, the backup wasn't complete. But I lost comparatively little and that should be easily replaceable.
I have no idea what killed it. Generally when a hard drive begins to make loud noises it pretty much := "bad", regardless of what the noise comes from. In this case, the way the noise changes when the computer tries to access the drive says "head crash"--but that doesn't tell me why, and I suspect I could only learn that if I opened the case. Opening the case would void the warranty, something I don't want to do on a drive which is a scant six months old and which cost $160.
I put in for an RMA but Seagate's warranty service center doesn't work weekends. Whatever. I'll just have to wait for it until Monday. Then sometime next week I'll box it up and ship it to them, and wait for my replacement drive.
Pity I can't just use this drive as credit towards a bigger one.
It's irritating to lose a hard drive, but I expect I'd be much more angry about it if I lost all that anime. As it is, I'm pretty phlegmatic about it, and have to shrug: I've had good luck with hard drives over the past 10 years, so it was bound to happen to me sometime.
The last drive I had go bad was a Western Digital 1.2 GB drive, and that was in 1998. WD had a good warranty on their drives and they replaced it, no questions asked...and I don't think I ever used it all that much, after that, because I'd replaced it anyway. Heh.
Lesson: BACKUP BACKUP!!! your data, if you value it.