I have learned some things, Nutter was correct, apologies Nutter,
so the noise was most likely from the head parking.
So WD drives feature intellipark which parks the drives every 8 seconds of inactivity!
which is totally stupid and creates shortened lifespan of the drive and is highly noisy.
here is also a thread about head parking behavior of WD:
https://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=63051
have recieved advice from an expert,
that HDDhackr latest release includes the ability to change intellipark timer.
So check the HDDHACKR readme! on how to do this
so disable it or set it to a long value.
or there are other utilities
think, that my drive bricked likely due to accidental plug in of a faulty drive first,
or could have been something as dumb as a loose cable.
if this happens to you try using the brute force flash instructions in the HDDHackr readme.
hope this helps someone
ps- note that I didn't hear this noise at all during using the drive on my laptop or xbox360 while not in emulator mode so they must have some kind of stay active signal sending to the drive. Another possibility is that the downward compression on the drive from the xbox360 drive caddy and slot amplified the noise