If your hard drive is more than three years old you should probably replace it anyway, even if it's NOT the hard drive making the sound!
And you're not going to "back up" your drive to another, new one, you're going to "image" it.
"Imaging" makes a complete, exact copy of the disk as-is.
Acronis True Image is, indeed one tool to do this. I don't know much about that particular product - aside from the fact that it WILL do the job nicely, as I use Partition Magic or Ghost for imaging disks. (Which I do A LOT, and as my preferred method of doing "full" backups, BTW....)
One thing to note about "cloning" your (sole) hard drive onto a new one when running Windows: It is best to do it AT LEAST SIX MONTHS AFTER ANY OTHER HARDWARE MODIFICATIONS TO YOUR SYSTEM.
Why?!?
Because Windoze keeps tabs on what hardware changes on your system and when, and if too much changes it will flag your system as another, totally different system and assume that you're "stealing" a copy of WIndows by putting it on a
different computer.
If a certain number of changes to the hardware it tracks happen within the same six months, it flags it for reactivation. NBD, but a pain, nonetheless.
I'm absolutely, positively sure that Windoze ALWAYS tracks your "C" partition's hard drive details WRT this, so when you "clone & swap" your hard drive it MIGHT say "Your hardware has changed" and simply ask you to reactivate on line.
But if you've changed too much stuff it will ask you to call them by phone in order to reactivate your OS.... (Again, NBD, just making you feel like a theif for doing something useful... to something that YOU OWN OUTRIGHT, is all....)
So purchase any of the three-mentioned programs to "image" your hard drive onto your new hard drive after you've: 1) Run Scandisk on all your exiting partitions, 2) Run Defrag on all your partitions AT LEAST THREE TIMES ON EACH (compact data makes the imaging go faster, you see....), and 3) followed the instructions for your imaging software to connect up the devices for imaging.
FYI: I recommend
Partition Magic (PM) to do this for One Big Reason: Once you've successfully moved everything over to the new, probably LARGER hard drive, you can use the partitioning tools to resize/adjust your EXISTING partitions as needed. PM is an excellent tool for managing your disk space/partitioning easily and reliably. Most other tools do not have partition-level management tools, only "total disk" stuff....