Irregular and annoying HD click noise (mostly in idle mode)

Hi there,
do you know the "click" noise your MacBook HD makes when you shut down your laptop? Yes?
Well, it seems my MacBook HD makes just that noise at irregular intervals, especially in idle mode (i. e. when no programs are running and nothing much is happening on my Mac ...). It's quite an annoying tick and especially at (quiet) night time can drive me up the wall.
From Activity Monitor, I can't see any disk access happening which coincides with the "click". Sometimes, shutting down the MacBook, waiting a couple of minutes and then restarting it makes the "click" disappear for a while, but it always comes back eventually.
I really would like to know what is happening here ...
Yes, I know that there are a few other threads here about just that topic, however, I don't think anyone has yet identified the true source of the "click":
It's definitely not a hardware problem since I have observed the "click" on now three different MacBooks, all using different drive models and makes (Seagute, Fujitsu etc.).
Any insight into this issue would be highly appreciated.
Kind reagrds from Berlin,
jan

Hallo everybody!
after having managed to solve the problem on my own the whole night and after a morning visit to the nearest Apple Service point, I got a solution, which I hope is not a mere "workaround".
Just to summarize: at the Apple point they told me immediately that such a noise would be absolutely normal; in particular, they told me about the "journling" of the HD the System is used to perform periodically in background (that sounds me strange, as I noticed no real activity when the noise was present). They suggested me verify the hd, initialize it and reinstall the system.
I did so and magically the disturbing noise was gone: as I anticipated above, I hope this struck at the root of the problem but I'll wait and see what is going to happen when my HD will be almost full again...
In conclusion, I thing the reason of the problem could really be some bad piece of software continuously causing "fake" HD accesses... it should be nice to know which piece of software it is.
Bye
Marco

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