Hard drive sounds-- won't stop running

We have a brand new 24" aluminum Intel-equipped iMac with the only upgrade being 2 gig of RAM. After being on for a while and after a few programs have launched, the hard drive starts clicking continuously, like it is continually trying to access the same area without success. It won't stop until we shut it down. While it is doing this, all programs launch fine and everything seems to work.
We have four other Macs (all a little older than this) and we never hear the hard drive on these. Perhaps they are doing the same thing and we just don't hear them? Our iMac is on most of the day, and I just worry it's not going to last long continuously making that hard drive clicking.
Any ideas? Thanks.

I would start by opening up Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor and see if you can narrow down what process is running. It could be any number of things from Spotlight indexing, Time Machine, cron tasks, or some other application checking for updates. Change the pull down menu to show all processes and click on the CPU tab to sort the processes by CPU usage.
http://ftp.georgetek.com/George/Activity_Monitor.png
Usually if a drive is clicking because of bad blocks your system will become very slow accessing data. You can test the drive to see if it is indeed failing.
1. Open up Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility select your hard drive on the left then look at the details at the bottom of the window and see if the SMART status is Verified. Next click on Verify Disk under the First Aid tab.
2. If you have Apple Care install TechTool Deluxe from the disk that comes with your Apple Care box. Launch TechTool then under options select Surface Scan and Run the test. If you think your drive might be failing then I highly recommend that you backup all of your data before running this test.
George

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Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
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Hard drive sounds-- won't stop running

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