Macbook's drive acting crazy!

Yes... crazy! I have a 3 year old mac and haven't had any major problems with it. But lately the drive has been acting up. Usually when I first open it up, the drive sounds like it's loading and then ejecting a disc over and over and over. Just before writing this, it was doing it for about 5 minutes nonstop. Everything else works fine while it's doing it, but as you all know, mac drives are loud - it's annoying. It will sometimes do it out of the blue as well. I had this happen about a year ago for a couple of weeks and then it just stopped. What is going on with my drive?

Assuming you're referring to the optical drive and not the hard drive, it may be getting ready to fail. The slot loading drives used in Mac machines are not the best and are actually rather fragile compared to the tray loaders.

All I can suggest it to keep an eye on it and be ready to replace it if it fails completely.

Again, assuming it's the optical drive, just replace it. Search Ebay for "dell m1330 drive" as the Dell XPS M1330 uses exactly the same LG Gsa-s10n slot loader. It's cheaper than buying the same drive sold as a Macbook Superdrive for some reason...

If it's not a superdrive, then you want the Panasonic CW-8221-C. Can't remember what laptops use this drive offhand, but once again it's cheaper to buy it when it's not sold as a Macbook Combo Drive.

...oh, and it might be worth checking to see if anything's stuck inside, jamming the limit switches so it's trying to eject a non-existent disc. The switch arm is on the left hand side of the drive, looking into the slot.

Yes sorry, it is the optical drive. To be honest, I very rarely use the drive. I pretty much only ever use it when I get a new music CD and I'm putting it onto my external.

Would there be a reason as to why this happened a good year ago and then stopped? And what would prompt this "behavior" again? As I mentioned, I don't really ever use it.

Thanks for the suggestions though. I suppose if it goes before I'm ready to buy a new laptop altogether and I find that I'm wanting/needing to use the drive, that I'll have to look into getting a new one. I also don't see anything stuck in there. I wonder what it would do if I just put a disc in there and left it?