Hard drive clicks from time to time

My laptop is an inspiron 1520, about a year old now. Ever since I've had it, the hard disk drive has been making a loud, random click from time to time. Sometimes, it will click twice in the space of two minutes, sometimes it will click only once in two or three days. Typically it's simply a loud snapping sound, like if you get a pencil and snap it against a wooden desk. It doesn't make any other sounds besides the usual hard drive sounds. For about a quarter of a second, the system pauses. I think it's related to heat, as it happens most often while playing a graphic-intensive game.

But like I said, it's been like that for a year now and still works fine. Chkdsk shows no problems, and even when backing up vast quantities of data, it runs fine.

Is this something I ought to be worried about? Has anyone else experienced it?

 

this is normal. some models of all hard drive types have this. apparently, the sound comes from the drive heads going into a "lock" position to avoid damaging the platters. as it were, there's no way of predicting if you'll get a drive that does this or not. still, some folks have managed to get Dell to replace their drives with different ones - although this can be a bit trial and error, since you can't know if you won't just get another clicking model.

 

I also have that symptom in one of my laptops (an Inspiron 8600). My hard drive, a samsung HM160HC, will suddenly make a very loud clicking/snapping noise, the system might stutter for a second, before continuing on as if nothing had happened. My friend, who bought the same hard drive for his inspiron 6000, also reported the same thing happening. I've run an HD tune error scan, and it turned up no results as well.

I've had the hard drive for 6 months now, and its had no problems whatsoever. I think that some drives in certain laptops will make the clicking noise, as the head changes or moves around. But I'm not entirely certain.

 

dell has fix but still only for for seagate