I'm a paranoid person when it comes to my computer, console, etc. so I don't know if I'm just overreacting or something.

I have a 3.5 year old MSI gaming laptop that cost me $1100 (I'm stupid, I know). It just started making this 'click' sound occasionally; maybe every 30 seconds to a minute. When I'm playing a game it'll also freeze for a split second whenever that click sound happens. There's no DVD in the disk drive or anything.

Now I don't know if this could be a hard drive issue but it's worth noting that the hard drive on this laptop died less than two years ago and I got it replaced with the warranty. It was a 24-month warranty so it's up at this point meaning it would reeeaaally suck if this thing breaks again.

Anyone dealt with something similar?

Usually when I hear a story like that I assume it would be the HDD. But it's an easy noise to rule out if you just compare it to ones on YouTube ( https://youtu.be/XwYSdD4fyRU )

@caska: Yeah I think it sounds like that. Lovely. This MSI laptop has been a pain in the butt and an absolute waste of money. I'll back up my files tomorrow and just wait for it to fully break down I guess.

Yep, sounds like your HDD is malfunctioning. If you're up for it you could try running CrystalDiskInfo (standard), it checks your HDD's health status. If your HDD is breaking down it should be able to verify it.

Not much to add to the other advice given here, but I will say if you're interested in testing the HDD before replacing it you can load a live linux distro onto a thumbdrive to do some basic SMART testing as well as read the logs and data off the diagnostic info. You can see how many sectors have been listed as failed in the drive, how long it takes to power on, etc.

I'll add that none of that is really necessary because as others have said it's almost certainly the HDD. If you don't use a huge amount of storage on that machine you can go buy an SSD for as little as fifty or sixty dollars or get a premium drive and they'll sometimes come with cloning software, letting you copy the old disk onto the new without reinstalling. There are also other free ways to do this with any disk but you may need an adapter and it will probably take some research to use the built in MS tools or Linux tools.

If you need details just let me know, I did repairs like this for seven years at my last job so hopefully I can help

@beanswater: If/when my laptop dies I'll just replace it. For an MSI product, it sure is janky as hell. Plus it has a AMD card which hasn't been great with a lot of games.