Faulty hard-drive

I just purchased a brand new laptop, and I believe the hard drive to be faulty. Here are the symptoms:

• It's a 500gb 7200 rpm hard drive, the relevant part formatted to ext4 and running Gentoo
• Every so often, an audible "click" will emanate from the hard drive
• For the next 1 or 2 seconds, the system freezes up (although the mouse still moves)
• This happens most frequently when compiling / moving lots of data (4-5 times every 15-20 seconds)
• It happens during non-hard-drive intensive use with a much lower frequency (although is particularly annoying while watching movies as while the audio picks back up when the system does, generally the picture stays constant until the next keyframe)
• The system picks itself back up without any problems afterwards, no errors are logged to dmesg

I brought this up with customer service and they said they can ship me a new hard drive, because apparently no other users have complained of similar symptoms. Does this sound like a faulty hard drive to you? My worry is that:

• I'm not 100% convinced it's a hardware issue
• I can't reinstall Gentoo or any other OS on it while for the next month as my internet connection is limited to about 100 megabytes per week
• Transferring everything between 500gb hard drives is a major pain in the butt with a 4gb flash drive, especially if this does not fix the problem.

Thanks,
Mala