Laptop hard drive making noise?

My laptop (Vaio EB) makes this really soft clicking/grinding noise. I only had it for a couple of months now.

It's from the right side, so I know it must be the hard drive.

and I know that it is a very common noise that laptop hard drives make when doing something demanding similar playing videos/music (hard drive is spinning faster).

But the problem is, the sound still persists even when I'm doing really light stuff like email, word, or just browsing the Net.

My laptop doesn't freeze, or get hot, or anything. I don't have any problems with it except the hard drive noise. Except once a while back, the screen did suddenly go black (and it wasn't my screen saver, as I was in the midst of scolling/typing) all for almost 10 seconds and then came back next to. But it's only happened once.

Is this something serious that I should look into? Help, please!