Mac Pro Hard drive clicking hard on shut down

[raymondthimmes]

I have a general question about a recently upgraded 2006 Mac Pro.

I recently upgraded my boot drive to a 1TB Western Digital 7200RPM sata drive.

I have a 2.66GHz Mac Pro late 2006. Running leopard. 4Gb Ram. Radeon 4870 HD (recently added). two other sata drives as backup. (200GB and 350GB, about 4 years old)

With the new drive I notice an odd clicking sound when ever I shut it down or send it into standbye. Like the drive is just stopping instead of spinning down... I have heard that this can cause permanant drive failure... Is this an issue I need to be concerned with?

thanks!

 

[nerdo]

This is the repeat clicking you hear when doing a full shutdown and not a sleepmode shutdown? My WD drives make the same sound in the same mac and have kept working for more then a few years. But I never trust any clicking sound from drives, in the past I had 18 drives click and die on my (most of them Maxtors btw) so I keep everything on two NAS backup systems.

The WD clicking sound I got was 3 click click click sounds, doesn't the mac have a SMART monitor option?

 

[nanofrog]

I have a general question about a recently upgraded 2006 Mac Pro.

I recently upgraded my boot drive to a 1TB Western Digital 7200RPM sata drive.

I have a 2.66GHz Mac Pro late 2006. Running leopard. 4Gb Ram. Radeon 4870 HD (recently added). two other sata drives as backup. (200GB and 350GB, about 4 years old)

With the new drive I notice an odd clicking sound when ever I shut it down or send it into standbye. Like the drive is just stopping instead of spinning down... I have heard that this can cause permanant drive failure... Is this an issue I need to be concerned with?

thanks!

How many clicks?
Any sound of whirring (spindle motor slowing down)?

It could be the heads parking themselves (moving off the platters to prevent impact damage, such as transportation). This should be a single click, though to me, it's more of a ka-thunk.

But generally speaking, any other clicking sound is a warning of the disk is going to die.

So clarification would be helpful to get it down (not make you panic if it's not warranted).

The WD clicking sound I got was 3 click click click sounds, doesn't the mac have a SMART monitor option?

The SMART monitoring isn't really worth squat in the MP IMO (seen cases where no errors were reported, when the disk actually had bad sectors to the point it was about to fail or had actually failed).

You end up having to remove the disk and run it on a PC to do a surface scan (low level data isn't passed properly in the MP, so trying to run a Windows or DOS based application fails). Reformat to get around the bad sectors if possible.

 

[mrt209]

Don't know if it's much help but had the same exact clicking sound on my 1TB WD in my 27in iMac i7. Checked online and a lot of people had the same problem, so might be "normal".

I took it to the apple store and they said there was nothing wrong with it, but was annoying so returned the iMac and hopefully will be buying a Mac Pro soon

Maybe return the hard drive if you still can...

 

[raymondthimmes]

thanks all,

The clicking is associated with a whirring "slow down" sound however I've never experienced one so fast.. maybe because I haven't had a new hard drive in 4 years.

It clicks on shutdown and sleep mode shutdown.

However it is just a single click. associated with a quick second or two of whirring down...

 

[nanofrog]

thanks all,

The clicking is associated with a whirring "slow down" sound however I've never experienced one so fast.. maybe because I haven't had a new hard drive in 4 years.

It clicks on shutdown and sleep mode shutdown.

However it is just a single click. associated with a quick second or two of whirring down...

It's just the heads parking from what you describe, so there's no need to panic.

 

[raymondthimmes]

It's just the heads parking from what you describe, so there's no need to panic.

oh that's good news.

thanks so much all!