IMac hard drive making knocking noise

Hi everyone. I woke up my iMac this morning, and the drive was making a knocking noise. There would be three "knocks" over and over again. Behind the noise, I could hear the whine of a motor speeding up, and then dying down. It repeated in a cycle: the motor winding up then dying down while three knocks could be heard. The computer would not wake up from this.
Finally, I rebooted with the install disc as a startup disc. When the computer turned on, it did not show the internal hard drive at all! I rebooted again, and this time the computer fired up just fine and everything was back to normal.
I've started backing up everything to an external drive. But I'm wondering: Is it time to go shopping for a new machine? This one is about four or five years old. I assume that if my hard drive is bad, it's not cost-effective to have it repaired. Is that correct?
Oh, FWIW, I did check the internal drive with the Disk Utility, and the SMART status said it was verified. (I don't know what this means, but I read about it online.)
Thanks.

Hi Roger. You were right about the pricing. I could have had a nice, much larger drive installed for about $279. But there was one thing that gave me pause: The screen was starting to show random lines and artifacts - all signs of the well-documented iMac display problems. Fixing that would have been a much more expensive proposition, and I decided a four-year-old machine wasn't worth it.
So instead, I backed everything up to an external drive and ordered a new 27-inch iMac, which is great. But while waiting for my new machine, I had to keep my old one alive. I noticed that the drive had problems waking up after the machine was asleep or off for more than a few hours. When this would happen, I would boot up with the installation disk and run the Mac hardware test. The test never detected any problems with the computer, but for some reason, just running the test (in the extended, 10-minute mode) would "wake" the hard drive back up.
After a few days of this, I came up with another solution. I just turned on iTunes and left it playing all night. I turned off the sound, so I didn't hear it. With this app running, the hard drive never went completely to sleep, and the machine would wake up every morning.
When my new iMac arrived, I connected it to my old machine (after waiting a few more days for a 800- to 400- Firewire adaptor - I didn't know the two machines used different Firewire connectors!) and I used Migration Assistant to move my data.
And with that, my old iMac died! It wouldn't boot up again at all. But it was still a good machine, and I didn't want to toss it. So I ordered a new 500Gb Seagate HD online for about $45 and a set of Torx screwdrivers. Using my new iMac to watch a Youtube video on how to replace the drive in the old machine, I swapped out the drive. The old iMac is now my kitchen computer, which I use for reading news, cruising the web and listening to iTunes. It doesn't need a large drive, since it's just used for light duty. And since it stays pretty cool (I'm not using it a lot or running CPU-intensive apps on it), the display problems so far have not reappeared.
Thanks again for your help!

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Thanks to you both for the responses.
I installed techtool, and then downloaded the current version, ran everything but surface scan (default setting is not to do this) and everything passed. I will probably do the surface scan overnight as I'm assuming that takes time. But, I guess it's a good sign that everything passed, though it leaves me wondering what all the humming is.
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A couple of nights ago I realized my five year old iMac was making a sound I have never heard it make before. It is a scratching noise that I assume is coming from my internal hard drive (hard drive is stock, has never been replaced). It isn't a super loud noise, but it sounds like the noise some hard drives make when they are "searching" or "thinking". I'm wondering if my hard drive is beginning to fail, or if the problem could be something as simple as dust or dirt caught in the drive. An audio sample is in the link below, please help me diagnose my problem. Thanks!
Audio sample: http://cl.ly/073d3U1e1t280M2X0m3F

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Contact Apple or your local AASP > Apple - Support - iMac - Service FAQ

IMac hard drive making knocking noise

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