Hard Drive Clicking at Regular Intervals

[Zixith]

So I've recently just purchased a laptop on eBay, one things I've noticed after having reinstalled Windows 10 and played around for a week or so, my 500GB Internal 7200rpm hard drive seems to be making these noticeable albeit very faint sound at regular intervals, I've recorded the sound take a listen:
https/clyp.it/ytm4ob20

You can hear the clicks in the recording and so I was wondering what everyone's opinion on this sound is and what it means for my HDD.

Note: CrystalDiskInfo reports health status as "Good" and executing "wmic diskdrive get status" in CMD for the S.M.A.R.T status returns "OK"

 

[caledbwlch]

That's a tough one. It sounds like there is drive access before the clicks all/most of the time. Have you tried turning off Advanced Power Management (APM)? Here is how to do it:

https/support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=3875

What model laptop, and does it tell you what type of hard disk drive in Device Manager? Have you monitored your disk activity in Task Manager while the drive is running and sorted the processes by disk activity? If so, what is on top and accessing the disk? Sorry for all the questions, but it will help figure in figuring out what is going on.

 

[Zixith]

It's a Toshiba MQ01ACF050 HDD and task manager is reporting 0% usage for the past two minutes I've checked. My OS and all of my app are on my SSD, the only thing I've got on this Toshiba drive at the moment is around 80GB documents (no apps, no Windows system files)

 

[keith12]

That's more or less an indication of the drive dying. If the platters get damaged, the read/write head can't finish it's task/search, so it starts it's process again (and over again), but often still won't find the target. So it pans across the platter, and hits a stop - that's the clicking. It happens at very fast speeds.

You should back up your drive as soon as possible, it could fail at any time. Obviously a replacement will be needed.