MBP: Annoying HD parking sound. Anyone tried this fix?

I would choose extended battery life and protection of my hard drive and data, over sound aesthetics, every time.

Umm its a BAD idea to keep your hard drive constantly spinning; which is what I'm assuming this thing does. IMHO you are going to kill the MTBF on the drive by using this thing.

manosaurus said:

And, again, I have not confirmed that this sound is even supposed to occur. Also, why does the HD park and immediately wake up only to park again in 20 seconds and then wake up again only to park in another 20 seconds AGAIN, over and over and over and over?! Does that even sound right??????

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Would you be willing to post a sound recording of the recurring noises? I don't have the MBP, so I couldn't tell you what is or isn't normal, but if you post it, I'm sure others can provide their feedback.

APM tuner X

On my last gen (E?) G4 Pwerbook I used, APM Tuner X

Works fine, although I've since not bothered applying it at bootup as I tend not to notice the clunks any more. Not sure if it will work on Intel though...

20 seconds?! That seems like a power management problem in OS X. Even on 'max saving' with no programs running, mine doesn't shutdown nearly that often. (The default is 10 minutes.)

Stupid question, but...
Unchecking the "put disk to sleep whenever possible" button in energysaver doesn't work, right?
And have you tried resetting the PMU?

Otherwise, I'd try and run that program. It's probably not worse than having it sleep/run/sleep all the time anyway. And if it's a defective drive, you're going to get it replaced when you send in your mbp for repair anyway. Just remember those backups.

ehurtley said:

20 seconds?! That seems like a power management problem in OS X. Even on 'max saving' with no programs running, mine doesn't shutdown nearly that often. (The default is 10 minutes.)

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FWIW The Seagate 100GB/7200rpm makes a clunk every 20 seconds or so. It rarely ever actually spins down. I understood that the clunk was the heads attempting to park but failing because OSX is almost constantly accesssing the drive for little things. Changing the settings in APM Tuner X reduces the clunk rate. But it also means that the likelihood that the drive will spin down is reduced even further.

This might be a dumb question, but does this account for the little "...tick..." I hear every so often?

Spectrum said:

FWIW The Seagate 100GB/7200rpm makes a clunk every 20 seconds or so. It rarely ever actually spins down. I understood that the clunk was the heads attempting to park but failing because OSX is almost constantly accesssing the drive for little things. Changing the settings in APM Tuner X reduces the clunk rate. But it also means that the likelihood that the drive will spin down is reduced even further.

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My first-gen MacBook Pro (15", 2.0 GHz, 256 MB VRAM,) has the 7200 RPM, 100 GB Seagate, and the only reason I have even noticed the noise is an active attempt to find out what it is you are experiencing. I have to be in a 100% silent room to hear it at all, and even then, it's not bothersome. It seems to be just the way the drive is designed, so unless it is very loud on your system for some reason, I would just deal with it. As the Mac OS doesn't try to shut the drive off until 10 minutes have passed, I doubt it's anything you can change. (If I start playing a graphically intensive game, the cooling fan quickly drowns out the 'clunk', as you call it.)

manosaurus said:

BTW, I have already tried the mirror widget as a fix for this issue and, for whatever reason it does not work for me so please don't bother with the suggestion.

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Why would you use the mirror widget? It's not even remotely for this issue. It's for people (like me) with the annoying hissing noise that occurs whenever the iSight is not in use.

manosaurus said:

I find the sound produced by this drive to be the problem.

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Today's headlines - moving parts make noise! More at 10....

On a more serious note, have you listened to other machines instore to see how they sound?

I thought I would resurrect this post and mention that I am having this problem with a clunk sound every 20 seconds on my brand new 2009 MacBook Pro.

The sound is only noticeable if I am in a quiet or low noise environment browsing or downloading off the net but it is still annoying.

It looks like Apple haven't done anything about this.


Art

i've got that too,
mine is fujitsu 500g HD which came with the macbook pro late 09 model as well.

I've checked around forums, mostly said that fujitsu HD is alittle more sensitive than others.

also tried turning off motion sensor, didn't work for me.
but it is not showing any problem for the drive too.

I'm planning to change it to SSD in the near future when price drop some more.
For now it work just fine, except alittle noisy sometime

I know this is an OLD thread, but I just wanted to chime in on what ultimately happens with this problem:

I have a late 2008 MBP 15", I replaced the original 250GB Seagate Hard Drive with the 500GB Hitachi Drive, and then a few years after that, did an OWC SSD, and used the data doubler to put the Hitachi in my old Superdrive drive bay. In late 2014, I upgraded to a rMBP 13 (late 2013) model, and I relegated the 2008 MBP to duty as an iTunes music player and pseudo-NAS (especially for my Firewire drives).

Already by this time, I had noticed some issues with the Hitachi, and after checking it out with DriveDX, I was shocked to see that for "Load Cycle Counts" the number was upwards of 3 million. DriveDX indicates that the typical lifetime rating for laptop hard drives is between 300,000-600,000. I made sure I had my data backed up on other drives, but left the Hitachi in place because I didn't feel like opening up the computer and swapping it and because I didn't have another 2.5" drive with enough capacity to replace it. I actually forgot about it until recently when the drive just totally died. I'm here because I'm trying to figure out what kind of drive I should replace the Hitachi with, but I fear that this is a problem with the chipset of the late 2008 Unibody MBPs and whatever drive I put in it is going to end up in a similar fate.

I did find these two matter-of-fact postings toward the beginning of this thread to be worth calling out for the smug and condescending language used to dismiss the drive head parking problem as a *non-issue.*

notjustjay said:

I would choose extended battery life and protection of my hard drive and data, over sound aesthetics, every time.

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i.e. this was just about one particular user's 'sound aesthetics' and not a real problem. The mansplaining gets even better:

SiliconAddict said:

Umm its a BAD idea to keep your hard drive constantly spinning; which is what I'm assuming this thing does. IMHO you are going to kill the MTBF on the drive by using this thing.

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Actually, you're incorrect: Outside of head/platter impact issues from jarring motion, keeping the drive constantly spinning is the best way of assuring a long lifespan for the drive. In this case, it's the constant, incessant start/stop cycles (load cycle counts) that have killed the drives on the computers that seem to have these problems. Actually solving the problem (reducing the excessive head parking that these drive controllers/drives are doing would definitely not be the 'BAD idea' as suggested here, and his 'IMHO' was wrong.

Don't be so sure of yourself, especially if you don't have a thorough understanding of what's going on. Even if you do, there may be something you've overlooked, so just try not to mansplain. (and yes, you can indeed mansplain to another man).