Laptop makes a clicking sound
 

I am using a Dell D610. Sometimes my laptop will randomly make a clicking sound. It’s not too loud, but it’s definitely noticeable. It is just one click. Yesterday, it only happened once. Today, it happened once in the morning and once again about 4-5 hours later. It seems to be coming from the left side of the laptop. I had another Dell D610 and it never made this clicking sound.

What is going on? Will it be a problem?

Thanks.

Does it sound like it's coming from the disc drive?

No; the disc drive is on the right.

Sometimes HDs make a clicking sound while they're dying. Although they're usually not too loud, and usually more subtle--unless the drive is massively crashing. But you'd have noticed some issues already if that was it.

It might just be a something caught on a fan.

Hush, you really have the worst luck on laptops, judging by the number of posts you made about it...!

Anyhow, I agree with the earlier prognosis that a failing hard disk is the cause of the clicks. Best way to find out for sure is to swap it out and see if the clicks still happen. Needless to say you should start backing up files.

It seems to me that parts of the case are just rubbing against each other. That can happen from time to time as the temperature of different parts of the case keep changing in size/warping at different rates, and they start camming. This is justified by the fact that the cooling system seems to be located on the left hand side.

He already mentioned that its a single click, and occurs on the left side. I have never heard of a dying hard drive that only clicked once AND performed a ventriloquism act.

If it is just a temperature thing, and all signs point to that, then you really have nothing to worry about.

I emailed the company that sold me the laptop and I told them about the clicking and they said:

"That's normal. Hard drive parks the reading head and that's when it makes a clicking noise."

Does this sound reasonable?

Read these:
Problem with hard drive clicking - ThinkWiki
The official Hard drive clicking noise thread

What you're possibly hearing are head load/unload cycles.

Get yourself a tool that can monitor the SMART state of your drive and keep an eye on the load cycle count when the drive clicks. If you can see an increase of these values when the click comes, well, then it's a normal load/unload cycle.

You can tweek PM and AAM so that the clicking sound happens not that often, but that will probably increase power consumption. I also had a lot of clicks with my Samsung drive in the laptop and after some tweaking of the options I'm down to a few clicks a day, which mostly happen while I'm not at the machine.

@packrat: Any reason for dissing my post or are you just in a bad mood?

Well, at first I thought you were not paying attention to the indicated symptoms.

I found this part of the op pretty significant:
and so I ruled out pretty much everything that indicated multiple clicks, as in the links you provided.

Though on second thought I suppose H&C could just have a different onomatopoeia for describing the event than I. (I would describe the events in one of your links as recorded here as a short burst of clicks, or a kachunk, or something indicating multiple percussive events rather than just a "click").

The sound of an unload/load cycles strongly depends on the drive brand and on many more factors. It can range from a low tick sound to a loud clank-like sound.

I also want to point out that everything that is written by you guys here is pure speculation, while monitoring the SMART values is giving you actual (real!) information where the sound is coming from.

If a system is making sounds that are odd, then one should not guess where they come from but find the true source.

From your profile packrat: "Interests: SCIENCE!, math, ..." <- science and math are based on proof. And checking for coinciding clicking sounds and increasing SMART values is a pretty good proof if you ask me. ;)

EDIT: To add some more. If there is no correlation between the clicks and the SMART values then of course this doesn't prove anything and we're back to knowing nothing. Next thing would be removing the harddrive and stressing the system from a livecd (Knoppix -> CPU benchmark to heat up the system), doing some warming-up/cooling-down cycles and observing if the clicking sound can be triggered this way. You can also try booting from a live-usbstick, so you can also remove the optical drive (which might be also responsible for clicking, however I highly doubt that - plus you also ruled that out). With most mechanical parts removed then this leaves some more places where to look: the cooling system itself (maybe clean it?)
If it's neither the mechanical parts like the drives nor the cooling system then I opt for packrat's explanation, but only then.

Despite being technically correct on several issues, repeatedly being a massive fucking tool is sure hurting your ability to get your point across there, Broseph.