Hard Drive Click and SMART Status

[shadowmatt]

You have all got to stop worrying... You will convince yourself things are bad.

1. The utility doesnt work on MacBook Airs. Have confirmed this on numerous machines. You see the errors happened at 0 hour, that means there is something in the log at when the drive was manufactured. It is normal, the utility just needs an update to recognize the drive in the MBA correctly.

2. The video test is both a good one and a bad one. Now you have to remember 2 things, the drive on the MBA is slow and you are streaming HD flash video.

This will max out the drive both reading and writing at the same time, one for the download and one for playing the video from buffer. Coupled with the airport and cpu usage you are pushing the machine. This will also raise the temperature of the MBA.

3. Why is the video test bad?

The flash video is streaming and the stopping and starting you get is when the buffering of the video fails as you have watched it to the point where it is currently downloaded, it then stops and downloads a little more before starting to play again.

The progress bar in flash is a buggy and can regularly show the video has played past the point is has buffered, this has nothing to do with the MBA and its the bugginess of the video player in flash.

You would need to pause the video when it first opens and then let it download the whole thing before pressing play. The blue progress bar which fills the time line would need to be all the way over to the right.

4. What does all this mean to the MBA and the drive?

The stopping and starting is the video downloading and the player trying to play it but catching up with the buffering.

The heat is caused by maxing out the different parts of the MBA, airport, cpu and hard drive.

The clicking sound is the drive stopping and starting. It does this while downloading the video, when it stutters, because the drive is not needed. The player has played as much video as has downloaded, there is no more streaming from the diskdrive as its stopped playing.

This sound is normal in all harddrives, you can hear it more on the MBA due to your location to the notebook (upclose), its lack of sound proofing (small, behind open keyboard, used for ventilation), and the drives lack of soundproofing. Its a smaller drive, its case is thinner, its parts smaller.

The noise is normal, you can hear it on other laptops. You can hear it on ipods when it buffers music or video.

 

[shadowmatt]

If you are interested, see this link, with the recorded sound. This is a notebook drive "feature" the small drives all do it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=191167

Now dont read too much into what they are saying, its the same ill informed discussion as on this forum. Its the sound of the drive parking.

The fixes they talk about dont fix the drive, infact the opposite, they actually put it in more danger of failure. The fixes access the drive constantly, which stops the drive ever stopping, that stops the head parking sound, but puts unnecessary usage on the drive, lowering its life.

 

[dzeroo]

got a new one

Well, I don't mean to derail this discussion, but since the clicking noise occurred also when not transferring tons of data, I ran the SMART utility (see couple of posts back). It came back with 300+ errors or whatever, so I called Apple. They walked me through a reboot (holding down Ctrl, Option, Apple, and Left-Shift), and followed by another reboot (Ctrl, Option, P, R). No dice.

Today, the dude at the geniusbar simply put his ear against the bottom while copying some massive file. He said he heard it too and replaced it on the spot. Seems like there's a couple of dodgy HDs out there. C'est ca.

BTW, make sure you back up your mail, iCal, etc. before you go in so that you don't forget anything when they ask you to transfer all your stuff.

P.S. Also, after doing the reboot thing (RTFM first), my iSight shut off. Did it again, and it jumped back on.

 

[shadowmatt]

Thats the whole point, it happen when not transferring data. When the drive parks the head.

Fair play for getting it exchanged, the guys at the apple store are no more than trained salesmen. They dont know hardware, the are not trained computer engineers. Its the same with the ones on the phone, they go through standard, written documents, and the smc reset is usually the first thing they try.

Bet you start to hear the noise on your new one.

And as I said the smart utility isnt configured for the drive in the Air. Everybody gets that error message, 400 errors and 5 in the log. Disk Util sees the drive as fine as does other smart utilities.

 

[squaremon]

i understand that the small click is the drive parks the head tho. But I do get loud click once awhile.I would say at least 3x louder than the smaller clicks. Its almost like u snap ur finger on ur mba

 

[queshy]

lol, so is it the conclusion that the clicking sound is normal?

 

[illian]

i understand that the small click is the drive parks the head tho. But I do get loud click once awhile.I would say at least 3x louder than the smaller clicks. Its almost like u snap ur finger on ur mba

i get the same loud click you're talking about. but i think this is just normal hdd noise...sometimes you're hdd gets into sleep mode. i know how loud my hdd in my pc is...especially if it starts up.
my dell xps m1330 got these clicks too but there was also the "spinning" noise of the hdd...

 

[squaremon]

i get the same loud click you're talking about. but i think this is just normal hdd noise...sometimes you're hdd gets into sleep mode. i know how loud my hdd in my pc is...especially if it starts up.
my dell xps m1330 got these clicks too but there was also the "spinning" noise of the hdd...

yea thats the click sound I'm having. A loud click follow by a spinning noise. Is that suppose to be normal? I mean i get the sound sometimes randomly when i web browse or open a document.

 

[shadowmatt]

Yes its normal.

 

[PDE]

Normal. They've always done this - I can remember my old wallstreet doing it in 1998. I think perhaps the samsung drive in the macbook air is a little louder, or perhaps it's because it's extremely quiet normally that you notice it when the heads park. Totally normal anyway and nothing to worry about.

 

[squaremon]

If you are interested, see this link, with the

The fixes they talk about dont fix the drive, infact the opposite, they actually put it in more danger of failure. The fixes access the drive constantly, which stops the drive ever stopping, that stops the head parking sound, but puts unnecessary usage on the drive, lowering its life.

So does that mean the people who have no clicking sound at all in their mba has a shorter HDD life? Thanks

 

[PDE]

So does that mean the people who have no clicking sound at all in their mba has a shorter HDD life? Thanks

I think all the drives make a little noise when the heads park, just that some are louder than others. Some are virtually silent. I've had three macbook airs in the past week and I really only heard the clicking on this latest one.

 

[stsanford]

Power Management?

Maybe it's power management, I just noticed that my MBA, while plugged in, doesn't do this as much....

 

[shoulin333]

ive noticed that it clicks when on battery and thus on "Better Battery Life" mode..

i believe this is simply the hard drive parking itself to save battery..

... when on A/C i rarley hear it... also if on battery and i am playing a song in itunes, but mute the volume (so the hdd is constantly reading) i do not hear it..

...i think is normal, we need someone to pay this close attn to their iPod classic and see if they hear the same thing when it is on, but not playing music..


i think there is nothing wrong, considering the laptop mades Zero noise other than that.. mine has no cpu whine, but i guess i got lucky there..

... Plus i plan to yank the HDD in about 6 months or so when SSD's become cheaper and bigger anyways.

 

[volitans]

And as I said the smart utility isnt configured for the drive in the Air. Everybody gets that error message, 400 errors and 5 in the log. Disk Util sees the drive as fine as does other smart utilities.

It has nothing to do with SMART Utility not being configured for the drive. SMART Utility just reads what the drive reports- it doesn't need to be configured for it because SMART is a standard. The drive is reporting those errors for a reason. The reason there is only 5 is because the SMART standard only requires the last 5 errors to be logged.

And just because Disk Utility and other SMART software reports as Verified doesn't mean there isn't something wrong with the drive. I've seen many dying and failing drives that Disk Utility reported as Verified, right up the time the drive stopped working at all. SMART Utility looks at more than just the overall SMART Status, it looks at the attributes and error logs too.

With that being said, does that mean the drive is bad? Not necessarily. Sometimes the drive logs errors that are caused by a bad HD cable, or bad software doing things it shouldn't. Maybe when the drives were being imaged, the cable connection wasn't quite right. Or maybe the imaging software was hiccuping, confusing the drive. But maybe the drive is having problems.

If there are attributes giving warnings, such as many bad sectors, I'd be more worried. Unless that is the case, just keep an eye on the drive, and backup data often (use Time Machine if possible!)

I hope that clears things up.

 

[queshy]

Ok, I think it's definitely a problem with the hard drives, or at least an irregularity. I'm on my second air - the f irst one clicked every 30 seconds yet the second unit, I have barely heard click 5 times since I got it a few days ago.

Maybe it's the specific model of the hard drive...the noise didn't bother me really though, overall the Air is the quietest apple laptop I have dealt with (MBP and MB).

 

[treehut]

Ok, I think it's definitely a problem with the hard drives, or at least an irregularity. I'm on my second air - the f irst one clicked every 30 seconds yet the second unit, I have barely heard click 5 times since I got it a few days ago.

Maybe it's the specific model of the hard drive...the noise didn't bother me really though, overall the Air is the quietest apple laptop I have dealt with (MBP and MB).

Did Apple replace yours because of the clicking? You now have a much quieter/quiet machine? Mine clicks every 6 seconds or so. I'm thinking of taking it in, but will I be told its "just normal?" Other people dealt with Apple around this? Even if it's "normal" I find it distracting. Otherwise LOVE this machine.