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Odd clicking sound on HDD - should I be worried?

S

silenahilena

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 13, 2010
47
0
I have this odd clicking sound on my HDD that came with my Macbook. It's a Hitachi HTS545025B9SA02. When I'm not doing anything on the Macbook, the hard drive runs fine. But when I do something, such as hit the back button constantly on my web browser or any activity really, it occasionally makes a weird sound. I am not sure how to explain it, though. I've Googled the odd clicking sounds for HDD's and all of the sounds I found were way too violent sounding. This sound coming from my HDD is very small and can only be heard in a silent room, with your ear close to the Macbook. Still, I'm trying to describe how it sounds....it almost sounds like an EXTREMELY SMALL frog croak. I'm not sure if it's just the wheel spinning...or what? Also, when it makes this odd clicking sound, it SOMETIMES freezes for about half a second, maybe a second.

Thing is -- I got this from Micro Center, which is 2 hours away fro me...and I don't think I can convince my parents to drive back there again.
 
spinnerlys said:
This is the sound of the read/write head moving around and occasionally reading and writing from and to the HDD.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I feel better now. Should I be worried that it occasionally freezes for .5 - 1 secs? Also, I upgraded to Crucial 4GB RAM. Probably doesn't make a difference though.
 
Okay, it sounds similar...but...I'm not sure...it's not as consistent as the video, though. Is there a way I can run a test?
 
Mine does it, too. I freaked out, took it in to Apple. Their displays did it as well. The genius did diagnostics & said nothing was wromg. Further researching, I found out Hitachi hard drives do this. The hard drive is just parking.
 
In my experience of failing drives ive always had weird squealing, whistling and whining noises along with a serious performance hit.
 
i have had a hard drive that went bad after it started to make a clicking sound. Honestly, it is very hard to tell whether the noise is normal or not without actually hearing the noise. The good news is that hard drives are very cheap these days. You should make sure you have an up to date backup on an external hard drive. That way if something does go wrong, you wont lose all of your files, and you can replace your hard drive and load your files from your backup.
 
Well, geez...I don't know what to do. I don't really have the money to buy a new hard drive - and after spending money on a product, I'd like all of its parts to work. I think I'll call Micro Center tomorrow.
 
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