It might be the head parking / reentering. This is called "load cycle" count. You might check smartctl and see if the number of load cycles increases after each

It might be the head parking / reentering. This is called "load cycle" count. You might check smartctl and see if the number of load cycles increases after each time you hear that sounds. I've had this problem with my Seagate Exos X 14TB. In the end I've disabled the idle2 timer, which is resposible to park the head after 2m of inactivity. This resulted in 1000 load cycles just after I had the disk for 100h somehow.