Can a "click of death" from one drive cause an SMI (system management interrupt) or similar?
I have two harddrives, and one seems to do the click of death sometimes (head crash?). At the same time video playback from another drive is disturbed (video compression artefacts occur, or video staggers). Why is this?
Yes. When a hard drive starts failing the disk subsystems of the PC can be overwhelmed by requests to reread/retry the data, causing a general slowdown.