Clicking noise in iMac HDD on startup--how common is this?

[ScutMonkey]

I have (had) a 24" iMac, which I purchased on Christmas Eve this past year. I love it, but it had a tendency to make all sorts of nasty noises. This was mostly a clicking that the HDD made for about 5 minutes on startup. I ended up backing up my iMac and the shop where I bought it exchanged it for a new one without question, so it's no longer an issue for me. But I've read that a clicking HDD is not uncommon on the Mac and I was wondering if anyone can tell me if it's really that serious an issue? The store employees where I bought it all said that it was an impending HDD failure, although I've heard that isn't always the case. Any thoughts on this?

 

[jmack549]

Almost 100% of the time it's a failing hard drive. It's called something along the lines of a "seek" failure, where the clicking is it seeking for a certain bit of data and having trouble locating it. Not because something is wrong with the data, but because the drive isn't storing it properly.

Either way, an HDD making noises is NEVER a good thing. When I work on computers and I have hard drives pulled out and sitting right beside me I can't hear them, can only feel them spinning.