hard drive noises -- western digital wd800ve

[Michael Roberts]

hi,

i'm encountering something funny in a hard drive i just installed.  issue 
is: the hard drive makes clicking noises sometimes when the system is trying 
to access the drive, and when that happens, there is a momentary (half or 
quarter second) pause in whatever the computer was trying to do.  e.g., if i 
type in a partial path in a terminal, then try to tab-complete it, i hear a 
little tic-toc, accompanied by a pause, before the completed path shows up 
in the terminal.

the tic-toc noise is a little melodic (kinda like vibes) if that matters... 
which it probably doesn't...

my info:

drive: western digital wd800ve.  i think this is an eide drive.
running 7.0-current on a dell inspiron 8600 laptop.  previously running 
5.4-stable, and upgraded to see if it would fix the problem, which it 
didn't.

this tic/toc noise only occurs occasionally when i run windows on the other 
partition of the drive.  it causes the same delay there, but like i said it 
only occurs once in a blue moon on the windows side, and is therefore 
tolerable.  on the freebsd side, it happens all the time.

anyone know what i should do?  any and all help would be appreciated.

thanks!