My year and half of 10 gig WD Caviar died just few days ago with clicks. The first symptom occurred about 6 months ago when the drive clicked loudly and the rpm wobbled for a moment. That happened few times in a space of week or so. It sounded like the drive started to perform the power on test during normal operation.
The following few months everything was back to normal, but about two weeks ago I got a bad sector on the boot block. This lead to very unreliable booting, i.e. the drive had to read the sector several times before Win started to come up. The result was click ... click ... click ... boot. I tried to fix it with scandisk which was powerless. Every time I tried to explore the disk it clicked several times. WD's DOS utility reported a problem with boot block and fixed it. Fine, I though.
Everything was fine for another two weeks, and I calmed down. Then suddenly on Thursday Windows run scandisk on boot time. Being a positive thinker I hoped that this was due to my girlfried powering down the 'puter without the shutdown command. Yeah right, the machine would not boot on Friday anymore. I slapped a new disk in, disconneted the old, and installed Windows. Luckily the WD still powered up and I got all the date transferred to the new drive.
When I proceeded to run the WD utility on the old disk, it started to make grinding noises and promptly died.
I was very lucky I got all my data rescued. I seems the process of hard disk dying can be very slow but we all know what the end result is...
Sami
PS. The new Quantum Fireball Plus AS is just fab compared to the WD. So, maybe every cloud has a silver lining after all
Sami