17" MBP Unibody: HD or fan noise?

[JimmyDreams]

I recently loaded BootCamp on my UMBP, and started playing Silent Hunter 4 in Vista on it.

The graphics card/cpu heat gets unbelievable! The fans come on and it sounds like a jet engine.

But it still played fine....the heat was a little disconcerting, but oh well.

 

[tarasis]

Thanks, the thing is I've had 7200RPM HD's in all 3 of my MBP's and the first one which was a Hitachi was really really silent and I swear I could hardly hear it! The second one was a Seagate and I could hear it but it wasn't too loud!
This 3rd replacement I can hear from a feet away which really annoys me!

The sound kind of comes from the top of the keyboard as well!

This is an interesting thread for me as I have a new 17" MBP with a 320GB with a 5400rpm disk. I too can hear what sounds like a fan like whoosh from the top left area of the keyboard even though the fan is apparently only going at 2000rpm. The right side is perfectly silent.

 

[gr8tfly]

This is an interesting thread for me as I have a new 17" MBP with a 320GB with a 5400rpm disk. I too can hear what sounds like a fan like whoosh from the top left area of the keyboard even though the fan is apparently only going at 2000rpm. The right side is perfectly silent.

The fans are silent at 2000 RPM. What you're hearing (as a couple of others have said) is the hard drive spindle. You probably have the same drive I had (the Fujitsu 320GB 5400 RPM). I'm betting you can hear the head seeking, too. The good news is the WD 7200, which replaced it, isn't really any lounder. It's just a quiet "whoosh" (and virtually silent head seek).

 

[tarasis]

The fans are silent at 2000 RPM. What you're hearing (as a couple of others have said) is the hard drive spindle. You probably have the same drive I had (the Fujitsu 320GB 5400 RPM). I'm betting you can hear the head seeking, too. The good news is the WD 7200, which replaced it, isn't really any lounder. It's just a quiet "whoosh" (and virtually silent head seek).

EDIT Removed my comment initial response.

Your right gr8tfly, my apologies, it is a (not so) quiet whoosh from the drive. I've sat and stuck my ear all over the MBP and it is from the lower left area.

Whats really odd for me is that until last night I had never heard it (admittedly I haven't used the MBP that much since it arrived last Thursday) and now I notice it all the time. I think part of the reason I hadn't it was mostly used on my lap but it is more pronounced on my desk.

Probably unrelated but the drive got a real workout yesterday when I finally ran Migration Assistant and copied over 130GB of data from the MacBook and last night did a TM backup of 170GB of data.

 

[gr8tfly]

EDIT Removed my comment initial response.

Your right gr8tfly, my apologies, it is a (not so) quiet whoosh from the drive. I've sat and stuck my ear all over the MBP and it is from the lower left area.

Whats really odd for me is that until last night I had never heard it (admittedly I haven't used the MBP that much since it arrived last Thursday) and now I notice it all the time. I think part of the reason I hadn't it was mostly used on my lap but it is more pronounced on my desk.

Probably unrelated but the drive got a real workout yesterday when I finally ran Migration Assistant and copied over 130GB of data from the MacBook and last night did a TM backup of 170GB of data.

I'm thinking you're also hearing the head seek on top of the spindle. It changes slightly, but pretty stable. The head seek sounds much more random and "buzzy"/chattery There's also a periodic seek sound (more a load/unload cycle which happens as the load goes to more of an idle state.

It's all most likely normal sounds, though. So unless you want to move up to a faster or higher density drive at this time, my guess is you'll get used to it.

Teaser (I was curious about today's pricing anyway). Performance wise, I don't have the specs side-by-side, but I would go with the 320GB 7200 RPM being faster than the 500GB 5400 RPM, but not nearly as much as a 320GB 5400 RPM to the 7200 RPM would be. (I'm assuming higher areal densities on the 500GB > 320GB). Fastest should be the 500GB 7200 RPM.

Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB $79.99

Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500GB 5400 RPM $94.99

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA $149.99

 

[tarasis]

Teaser (I was curious about today's pricing anyway). Performance wise, I don't have the specs side-by-side, but I would go with the 320GB 7200 RPM being faster than the 500GB 5400 RPM, but not nearly as much as a 320GB 5400 RPM to the 7200 RPM would be. (I'm assuming higher areal densities on the 500GB > 320GB). Fastest should be the 500GB 7200 RPM.

Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB $79.99

Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500GB 5400 RPM $94.99

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA $149.99

Mmm, I am interested in the Seagate Momentus drive but where I would order it from here in Germany it is marked for unknown delivery date. Will wait and see

Thanks for the pointers.