So, I have a Dell laptop (Dell Inspiron N5110) which I had for 5 years which has a Seagate 500GB hard drive (ST9500325AS).
Yesterday, while the laptop was turned off it fell of my desk (2.3 feet) and hit the carpet.
I plugged it back in and it started up just fine. No problems, nothing.
After that i launched up a game (Team Fortress 2 to be exact) and while I was playing the game suddenly froze and the hard drive was making a not so loud grinding noise. That lasted for about 5 seconds and after that the game unfroze and the hard drive wasn't making that sound again.
I got a little bit scared, so i opened up HD Tune Pro and did a full Error Scan. While it was doing the test i could hear a faint high pitched noise coming from the hard drive when I put my ear on the laptop. The weird thing was that the noise was in a pattern (I don't remember the pattern) and it was repeating the same noise pattern till the end of the Scan. The scan results were fine with no damaged sectors. After that i did a File Benchmark (Read and Write speed) for 200MB and the results were:
Read: 63485 KB/s
Write: 61965 KB/s
The laptop is functioning fine, but I need to know what was the problem.