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carbonmotion

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 28, 2004
983
0
San Francisco, CA
I have a 15" Alu with a 4200 rpm hd and a 512mb of ddr ram... anyways, whenever im working in iphotos or preview with alot of big photos or a big pdf, and i use a scrow bars, its really choppy and the harddrive wine becomes more eloganted instead of short bursts (still pretty quite though)... my question is, is this normal or do i have a defective harddrive?
 
Hmmm...are you on the latest iPhoto? As I understood it, previous versions of iPhoto were dogs with large amounts of photos...
 
Open up Activity Monitor and check how much RAM is free/in use. If it's just a tiny sliver, about 5 or 6MB or so, something is taking large amounts of RAM (most likely iPhoto). I personally never ever hear my HD, either something is drowning it out, or it's spun down. But I do hear my iPod's drive from time to time, it's a very high pitch whine, bugger must be fast!
 
229 used
283 free

um...its not terrible serious, but does anyone else have a powerbook 15" aluminum and noticed that the you can hear the harddrive clicks? not as loud as the ibooks but still present... i mean there is really no reason for apple to use such sh*tty drives with FDB technology on so many available drives.

Counterfit said:
Open up Activity Monitor and check how much RAM is free/in use. If it's just a tiny sliver, about 5 or 6MB or so, something is taking large amounts of RAM (most likely iPhoto). I personally never ever hear my HD, either something is drowning it out, or it's spun down. But I do hear my iPod's drive from time to time, it's a very high pitch whine, bugger must be fast!
 
I've never heard much sound from the hard drive in my 15 inch Aluminum wonder other than the occasional click and the motor engages/disengages since I have it set to spin down whenever possible.

You might have a defective HD and should contact Apple Care.
 
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