I have an old hard drive in an old computer that annoyingly clicks (it's hard to describe - makes a sound like someone pressing and releasing a switch) every 2-8 seconds continuously 24 hours a day for weeks and months straight (it is so regular that some joke that they can use it to define the time). SMART reports that it is very healthy, and I have used it for months perfectly while it is doing this. I don't know if this is related but it seemed to start when I ran john for long periods of time. (I had a previous hard drive in the same computer die while I ran john for long periods of time.) I thought that maybe the processor intensive process was putting out lots of heat and overheating the drive, but the inside of the computer didn't seem hot. Does anyone have any ideas? Should I be concerned? Does john or something else wear down hard drives?

whenever I hear a hard disk "clicking", I start backing up my Important data because I know the drive is going to "crash and burn" soon......

..running John should not wear out a drive at all AFAIK........

Ditto. It may crash tomorrow or it may crash two months from now, but that's usually not a good sign. I'd back up all my important stuff ASAP though.

And a second ditto. You might get lucky and get another couple days/weeks/months of use out of that drive, but I wouldn't trust it to hold any important data. Backup anything you don't want to lose......

john the ripper? dictionary attack might stress memory some and brute force attack definitely stresses your CPU, but shouldn't be churning the HDD at all AFAIK. Maybe you download a trojan instead of the real thing by accident. One of the hazards of playing with cracker tools.

Hard drive is going back. Run a dft. Hard drive diagnostic tool to test if the hard drive is bad

I can tell from the hard drive on a p3 I got if the weather has gone cold. My wife leaves the windows open in the house and when I boot the p3 up the drive grinds away untill it gets going. Sounds like an old bearing that needs oiling.Look after those drives.