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hard drive maakes slight click every 30 sec or so

dukebound85

dukebound85

macrumors Core
Original poster
its very faint, but def audible. it is a 500 gig hd i put in not even 4 months ago

no slowdowns though and disk utlity says no issues

should i be worried?
 
Thats exactly what my Dell did right before taking a crap..
It started with the click then turned into the worst grinding/screeching noise you could ever hear from a computer.
 
If I were you I would be sure to make a back up because as shady said, clicking is the precursor to HDD failure a lot of times.
 
Drewsky87 said:
If I were you I would be sure to make a back up because as shady said, clicking is the precursor to HDD failure a lot of times.
Click to expand...

It's a subtle difference, but the click of death tends to be louder than (what I suspect) the OP is hearing.

If it sounds like a muffled tap and it occurs after a period when the drive's not being used, chances are it's just the read/write heads parking themselves. You can change the sleep interval using hdparm, but it's really not necessary. The load cycle count of most laptop drives is far, far higher than server drives, so unless you have reason to suspect that your drive is sensitive to load cycles I'd just forget about it.

Still, backing up regularly is always a good idea...
 
ppc750fx said:
It's a subtle difference, but the click of death tends to be louder than (what I suspect) the OP is hearing.

If it sounds like a muffled tap and it occurs after a period when the drive's not being used, chances are it's just the read/write heads parking themselves. You can change the sleep interval using hdparm, but it's really not necessary. The load cycle count of most laptop drives is far, far higher than server drives, so unless you have reason to suspect that your drive is sensitive to load cycles I'd just forget about it.

Still, backing up regularly is always a good idea...
Click to expand...

yea i will now on my laptop as well. i already had a 250gig wd drive fail on me within a year on the same laptop. wasnt fun
 
dukebound85 said:
yea
Click to expand...

Unfortunately it's "normal"

I had the same thing happen to a 400gb WD and 500gb WD. I ended up returning the 400 for a 500 and it had the same damn annoying clicking. Returned it and got a Seagate and couldn't be happier. (if you search my threads, you can see I had a post on it).
 
back up your data. your drive is failing. also turning the hard drive off and on (by spinning down the drive or turning off/sleeping your computer) will increase the chances it will break. keep the drive spinning and make sure you backup asap. that thing will fail.
 
Mine has been doing the same ever since it was brand new, clicks every now and then.

btw its a 500gig samsung in my alu MB.

hope its not seriosu, i havn:t noticed any slow downs/skips or anything.
 
This could be an indicator that your hard drive is about to die. I have found that Apple laptops have very poor hard drive damping systems. I have had to replace many hard drives for many friends with Apple laptops. The hard drives just seem to die within 3 years or much less in Apple laptops. I highly doubt its a quality issue either because Apple uses hard drives from a wide amount of companies and they all tend to die inside their laptops.
 
I'm at my wit's end with this same exact sound! It DOES sound like mice playing ping pong inside my computer. I've read everything, absolutely everything available on teh internets for the past 3 months about this problem and nothing works. I've tried hdparm-isan. Nothing. I've tried the "put it to sleep for 3 seconds" trick. I've tried the smc fan control trick. Nothing.

It's amazing how annoying such a quiet sound can be! It's like chinese water torture in your ears. Little chinese ping pong playing torturing mice in my MBP!

Anyhow, like I said, I'd had enough. The seagate had to go. I was going to "sidegrade" to another 7200 hard drive. This time I went for more storage, an Hitatchi 320GB 7200 beast. If the engine is belching smoke, you buy a new engine right?

Well...I'm a creature of old (windows) habits, so when I got the drive I did a clean install of 10.5.6 expecting a slight speed increase and NO NOISE! I couldn't wait.

Long story short...within 3 hours the noise started again! With a totally new drive!!! What gives? I've had this MBP for over a year without a single problem. I'm beginning to suspect that this isn't a hard drive agressive head parking issue. But what could it be? Why would a brand spanking new hard drive with a fresh and shiny new OSX installation continue to click. click. click...........click......click.click..................click....click....click

every 3 seconds to 10 minutes apart. continuously. forever. click. and frikkin ever. click. clickclick. 😡😡😡😡😡

help? 😱
 
wow, my mb drive, which i have had for about 3 months has 38573 load cycle counts

my desktop which ive havd for 15 months, only has 672

apple needs to get their sh*t together. i bet this is what killed my last mb hdd😡

i installed your program and it hasnt stopped

wtf
 
dukebound85 said:
wow, my mb drive, which i have had for about 3 months has 38573 load cycle counts

my desktop which ive havd for 15 months, only has 672

apple needs to get their sh*t together. i bet this is what killed my last mb hdd😡

i installed your program and it hasnt stopped

wtf
Click to expand...

Wow. Lots of cycles.
 
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