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?
Failing hard-disk drive (HDD)
Incorrect video BIOS/UEFI setting
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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