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Is this a hard drive problem? Losing my sanity.

O

oneofthesedaves

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 6, 2011
154
0
Tennessee
I have a late 2009 MBP that was running out of hard drive space. A month ago I bought a 750GB Hitachi Travelstar hard drive to replace the original one. It worked great for about a week. Then I started hearing a periodic clicking noise. I called Hitachi and they said that the drive was going bad, so they sent me another one. I installed the new one and then put the failing drive in an enclosure and tried to use disk utility to erase it before I sent it back. That's when it failed. It no longer works.

The 2nd replacement was fine for a few days, but then I started hearing the clicking sound again, so I put my original drive back in and put the replacement in a hard drive enclosure. I booted from the drive that had been clicking, but it isn't doing that anymore. What gives? The times when I would hear the noise were when the MBP was good and hot (had been running for a while) but was sitting idle such as when I'm reading something and not loading any files/apps. Do you think it's just the hard drive?

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
I took the drive that I suspected of being defective out of the MBP and put it in a hd enclosure. Then I booted the mac from it. I used it for a couple of hours and it never made the sound, so I put it back in the MBP. After an hour of use the sound came back. I don't get it. Could something else be making this sound?
 
Could be the SMS sensor in the MBP logic board and the hard drive interfering with each other. They always recommend to get a hard drive without SMS so that this doesn't happen.
 
The SMS occurred to me earlier, so I used terminal to disable it, but it is still making the noise. I wasn't aware that drives themselves had SMS. I'll have to check to see if this one has one.
 
oneofthesedaves said:
The SMS occurred to me earlier, so I used terminal to disable it, but it is still making the noise. I wasn't aware that drives themselves had SMS. I'll have to check to see if this one has one.
Click to expand...

Some do and some don't. But, that's really what this sounds like to me.

I had no idea that you could disable SMS in terminal though...neat.
 
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