You are a desktop technician at a large company. A user reports that the desktop tower has begun making a rhythmic clicking sound, and tasks such as booting Windows and opening local files have become noticeably slower. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of these symptoms?
Solid-state drive (SSD) nearing its write-endurance limit
Cooling-fan blade striking a cable inside the case
A mechanical hard-disk drive (HDD) uses an actuator arm that moves across spinning platters. When the drive develops bad sectors or mechanical faults, the actuator may repeatedly reset, producing a distinctive "click of death" sound. Read-retry cycles also slow down access, so the PC boots slowly and files take longer to open. Solid-state drives (SSDs) would not produce this noise because they contain no moving parts, and other components such as cooling fans or a misconfigured video setting would not typically degrade disk I/O performance.
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