Possible Failing Harddrive?

[weekendsrule32]

I have a Unibody Macbook, and recently it has been very slow. But not with processes as much has hard drive related actions such as playing back saved video, loading files in the finder, especially applications, and its been temporarily freezing lately for like 10 seconds. I have also noticed unusually loud clicking noises from the hard drive, which i am pretty sure screams imminent hard drive failure. Do this sound like a hard drive issue? Also, an unrelated question, does 4 gigs of ram make a noticeable difference over 2?

P.S: I realize I Spelled Hard Drive Wrong In The Title

 

[zachsilvey]

I Leopard 2 gigs was enough but Snow Leopard seems to eat up more so 4 would be a good idea. I have noticed on a few machines including a MacBook, Mac Pro and iMac that 4+ is necessary if you run any memory intensive programs like Photoshop, Final Cut, iMovie, and unfortunately FireFox.

On the hard drive, it does sound like imminent hard drive failure. I would recommend making a full back-up and putting in a new drive. You can get 250-500gb for under $100s easy. Put the old drive in a external enclosure and use it for backup until it dies.