LOUD, LOUD hard drive clicking

[phillipjfry]

Albeit, I really had the hard drives working in full capacity when I was downloading a torrent, playing itunes, playing CS through crossover and searching the interweb with Firefox, while emptying my trashcan, but after all this, I heard the most nauseating hard drive clicking I've ever heard in my 14 years of playing on computers. I then hard rebooted my computer and all was fine and well. Do you think that this final sound and my previous complaints of file/folders going AWOL have something to do with hard drive failure that even the hardware tester failed to find? Has my iMac, which is no more than 6 months old, been shipped with a faulty hard drive?
Or did I simply push the hard drive too far? Any thoughts welcome

 

[Sun Baked]

I think I'm killing the Superdrive on mine, but I'll beat it until it dies.

The HD click is the drive recalibrating during the heat cycles.

Shouldn't hear it too often. A click every now and then -- usually not too noticeable.

But if it was loud enough to be heard continuously after downloading for awhile, and doing many drive activities at once, I'd probably worry and think about getting a 300GB external HD and making a backup -- just in case.

May last 1 day or 6 months -- the series of clicks can mean is starting to suffer heat death.

Check disk utility and see if the smart status is giving a warning, though I don't think it will.

They sometimes crash quickly, and the drives these days seem to be a consumable. Not much Apple can do about it.

 

[phillipjfry]

How willing will Apple be in replacing my drive? I think my drive might have been a lemon since day one. I have had to reinstall OSX at least three times since I got this computer (Mar '07) and constantly suffer lockups

 

[scaredpoet]

How willing will Apple be in replacing my drive?

Depends... is your iMac still under warranty?

 

[Habakuk]

First of all: Save your important data ASAP if there is some.