Externals are dirt cheap now. You can get a terebyte for a couple hundred bucks with multiple drives. Hard drives have a short life span 1-5 years, so back up. If you are comfortable opening up the PC and running it, you should be able to pinpoint the cause of the noise fairly quick. If you know what exactly the problem is, the phone call should go quicker. If you have to send your PC away, be sure it's backed up. I had a friend who had a Dell and they sent back a newly formated HD. He was a bit upset.