How to eliminate hard drive whirring noise?

My hard drive has recently started emitting a fan-like noise (in fact, when I first noticed it I thought it was the fan). The sound comes from under the right wrist pad and when I put my wrist on it (e.g. when typing) the noise is greatly diminished (about 20% of what it is without my wrist on it).
My Macbook used to be completely silent, this is loud enough that I can hear it in a coffee shop.
Any fix for this, and what do you think this signals for my drive? Is it a bad sign that it's whirring can be heard audibly?

Hi there,
buying a new harddrive won't help, i'm afraid. I have the same issue - I might be a bit pedantic (because the noise is just a slight "blowing" sound. But it drives me mad to know, that it just needs to put my wrist on the machine to get the noise go down to a bearable level.
I bought several new harddrives - but they were even more noisy than the original Hitatchi one. I realized, that when you just slightly put your fingernail on the running (non-apple) harddrives surface, that sound gets less noisy. Then I realized, that apple glued a black foil on their drive that does what my fingernail did on the other drives That is the reason why the original drive is less noisy compared to the new ones. But ****- it still makes me mad
Now I look for such a foil to glue it to my new drive - just to get the status quo with the new drive. But was not successful so far to find one.
Sorry, that I can't provide an answer - but just wanted to say, that buying a new drive does not really solve your problem.
Maybe someone can tell me where to buy one of those incredible foils :-))

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