Macbook HDD making a weird hiccup noise

[risenshine85]

Ok, this is a month old macbook
Maybe, I did not notice this earlier, but I notice that hard drive is pretty quite but every 10-15 secs, it almost has this faint click noise. Is anyone else experiencing that? Its not that loud, but loud enough to hear if you are in a quiet room or library.

Seems like a click noise every 10-15 secs even when hard drive is idle

 

[skorpien]

I've had this issue on my MBP. From what I've gathered, it's just the OS parking the heads on the HDD. It's a safety feature built into OS X, and while it's possible to disable it, you may end up damaging your HDD in a fall or jolt if the drive heads aren't parked properly.

 

[risenshine85]

So, I guess everyone's getting that. Maybe I was in a honeymoon phase where I never noticed it.

 

[skorpien]

It could be that different makes of hard drives make louder noises as well. I haven't noticed it with my Alu MB, but it could be that I'm not listening for it. I'll check with mine tonight, but then again I also don't have the stock HDD in there. What HDD do you have in yours?

And fwiw, it seems that only if your HDD is making LOUD noises do you have to worry. You can check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drive in Disk Utility, and if it checks out then I'm sure you've nothing to worry about.

 

[Psychmike]

It could be that different makes of hard drives make louder noises as well. I haven't noticed it with my Alu MB, but it could be that I'm not listening for it. I'll check with mine tonight, but then again I also don't have the stock HDD in there. What HDD do you have in yours?

And fwiw, it seems that only if your HDD is making LOUD noises do you have to worry. You can check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drive in Disk Utility, and if it checks out then I'm sure you've nothing to worry about.

Sorry, I don't have time to find it now but on the Apple support forums, this issue is discussed. Some folks are saying that either the Macbook or harddrive firmware are over-aggressive in power saving and may accidentally be using up head parking cycles. Someone said that based on the number of cycles used, they expect their hard drive to fail within 1.5 years!