The sound is the heads moving off of the "loading ramp" and settling onto a track by finding the servo wedges. Essentially, unlike many 3.5" desktop hard drives which have a "landing area" on the platters for the heads to go to when not in use, notebook drives have a "load ramp" at the outside of the platters. The heads slide up this ramp and off the platters when not is use.
Some drive attempt to load the heads on the ramp when not in use to limit damage if the drive is dropped. They also use accelerometers to sense a fall and load the heads during the fall. Or, if your energy settings turn off the drive when not in use, the drive loads the heads and spools-down, but does not power off.
After coming off the loading ramp, the heads sweep across the platters looking for what's called the "servo." Think of this as like "electronic grooves." The servo defines the tracks. Once it catches the servo, the drive starts operating.
Those are the noises you are hearing.
The SMART status looks great. Read Error Rate, Reallocated Sectors (the important one!), seek errors and spin retries are all zero. The Load Cycle count shows how many times the heads have been loaded onto the loading ramp. The Power Off Retract Count is typically the number of power-off or emergency retractions of the heads (i.e. power pulled), but this number doesn't seem right. It could just be that the drive manufacturer hasn't implemented this parameter. They are not "required" to implement all parameters to support S.M.A.R.T.
Jeff
