Failing Hdd Or Bad Ram/ram Slot Or Bad Motherboard?

SPECS: i5 6500, gtx 1050 2gb, Kingston HyperX Fury 2x4gb ddr4 2133mhz, 1tb seagate barracuda st1000dm010, samsung ssd 120gb (I have windows on this), Gigabyte s1151 ga-h110m-s2h.

So I was about play Sea of Thieves with a friend but i had to update the game and in order to do that you have to have windows updates enabled (because of microsoft store), i have windows updates turned off in the local group policy editor. Picture: https://imgur.com/a/LkYwAfy

So i turned it back on but forgot to restart or force update policy through cmd and i clicked play my pc started making a continuous noise sounded like a whirring fan. Then i slapped the top of my case a few times and it went away and when i tried to load in a game it started taking forever so i quit the game and restarted my pc and it was stuck at the shut down screen for 15 minutes, got unpatient and force shut down the pc.

After restarting it didn't want to boot windows (I "succesfully" booted in once before repairing but it was extremely slow and windows crashed so i restarted again) and after restarting enough times it loaded me into the windows repair screen, so I repaired and i was finally able to boot in but i noticed that a lot of files got corrupted and I couldn't open programs like steam,discord so applications that have frequent updates when booting up the system (could've got corrupted that way) and my hdd was making a weird noise when in use. HDD's sound: https://voca.ro/hYeuks7rI3o

So i checked my SMART stats with crystaldisk it said its healthy then ran all the available basic tests in SeaTools and all of them passed but in the meantime it was still making the noise and new files still got corrupted after countless of restarts. Also windows went through the disk repair many times, probably 80% of the reboots it started fixing the disk(I clicked on disk repair in windows before so it wasn't automatic but it basically did it almost every bootup so thats probably not a good sign).

Then i got suspicious of my RAM so i removed one stick and it ran through the windows disk repair fairly quickly and my hdd didnt make that noise, but then after restarting and trying other things it started again with this single 4gb ram in the pc only, so i ran a full memtest86 3 times on both sticks at the same time and it found 0 errors and just in case i ran a memtest on the stick that i removed before which had 0 errors as well. So i ended up with the conclusion that no matter which stick and which slot i use i still have the issue.

What could this be? Did my data get corrupted because I force shut down while it was maybe trying to update windows (since i enabled it back just before without updating policy, that could have messed up something)

Or is my HDD failing in a way these tests can't see?

Should i just reinstall windows on my ssd and run some software that scans for corrupted data on my HDD?

Or could it be my memory causing corrupt data and my HDD making that noise is because its trying to read corrupted data?

 

Because of the mechanical noise, I would lean hard to an impending HDD failure. Do you have a backup image?

Just because all the diagnostics come up clean, you can't rule out mechanical failure.

Perhaps it may be time to invest in an SSD.