Since osx is built upon bsd/unix, it suffers from the dreaded load cycle count issue. When you hear your drive clicking every few seconds that means your hard drive's read /write head are parking and resuming again. That is not good becuase considering an average hdd now claims to have a max of 600,000 load cycles, us mac users are getting up to > 1000 a day with intensive use! It means our drive will die within 1 year (most drives). Linux community already knows about this and came out with fixes...
Here is what i did.
First I went out and purchased a brand new 320 GB seagate hard drive 5400 rpm ($84!!). After installing it (see www.ifixit.com), I noticed that the drive clicked like crazy when I was idle, not good. So I went to http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/ and configured hard drive advanced power management (not hard, some unix knowledge) on my computer. Please read the documentation pdf supplied. The documentation says that it sets power management to max(254) which basically means no more clicks but then no more spindown , which means drive may become a little warm. I set mine to 200 and my drive is a nice cool 35 C and no clicks!
BTW western digital is not as good with setting hdapm so do not get that brand I dont know why it is not as good must be firmware. Also to check loadcycles you may want to google and download smartmontools through macports and learn how to use it (not hard).
So that helped me fix the "clicking" hope this helped you!
Here is what i did.
First I went out and purchased a brand new 320 GB seagate hard drive 5400 rpm ($84!!). After installing it (see www.ifixit.com), I noticed that the drive clicked like crazy when I was idle, not good. So I went to http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/ and configured hard drive advanced power management (not hard, some unix knowledge) on my computer. Please read the documentation pdf supplied. The documentation says that it sets power management to max(254) which basically means no more clicks but then no more spindown , which means drive may become a little warm. I set mine to 200 and my drive is a nice cool 35 C and no clicks!
BTW western digital is not as good with setting hdapm so do not get that brand I dont know why it is not as good must be firmware. Also to check loadcycles you may want to google and download smartmontools through macports and learn how to use it (not hard).
So that helped me fix the "clicking" hope this helped you!