Noisy HDD in Optical Bay

[ov3reasy]

MacBook Pro9,1 15" 2012
About 3 months ago I installed a Samsung SSD 840 PRO 256gb in my main bay and moved my Apple HDD 750gb to the optical bay. It worked great for 3 months until last week, it started this loud clicky popping noise. The computer still seems to be performing ok, it is just very loud. Also it doesn't matter what I am doing i.e. video v.s. email it's there either way.

In system info under the Apple HDD it says
S.M.A.R.T. status: Failing

This computer is barely over a year old and I find it hard to believe that the drive would be going,
Another forum suggested that the optical bay may not be set up for 6GB/s because the dvd player operates at maybe 3GB/s or something like that. I can see the logic in this possibility but there must be a workaround for this.

Question 1:
Is there a script solution or some other work around to keep the HDD or a replacement HDD in place?

Question 2: Assuming the HDD is still good.
Should I swap the drives, SSD in the optical bay and the HDD in the main bay?
What would be the drawbacks?

 

[blueroom]

Failing drive is going to fail. Better have a backup.

If it's got AppleCare put it back to stock and get it fixed, else swap out the HDD for a Seagate 1TB SSHD.

 

[ov3reasy]

Failing drive is going to fail. Better have a backup.

If it's got AppleCare put it back to stock and get it fixed, else swap out the HDD for a Seagate 1TB SSHD.

thanks for the reply, i bought a seagate 1tb sshd. so far the seagate hybrid drive is working great! good deal at $100 and only took me 10minutes to swap the drives.

restoring via time machine however did not go well, due in large part to the restrictive permissions.
i was using a 2nd user, allowed as admin, as my primary and had my user folder and all my personal data stored on the failing hd.

because of this i needed to use the original admin user acct. to perform the time machine restore. the first user was not recognized as owner of my data and i didn't know how to fix the problem.
time machine fail! in my opinion.

i created a new user and started sort of from scratch, i will be using Carbon Copy Cloner as my backup program from now on.