I'd say every 3-5 seconds or so I hear a little click sound from the harddrive, I know occasionally this is normal. However, I don't know if it's supposed to make that noise that often?
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Question about ibook harddrive.. problem?
- Thread starter calebjohnston
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Mine does this as well, and I'm sure it's normal as long as it's not a grinding sound. The more apps I have open and the more I'm doing the more I hear the sound. And I have 1GB of RAM with no pageouts happening, so I guess it's the nature of the beast.
next sound you (don't) hear
The next sound you hear could be the lack of sound (lack of spinning) of your hard drive. Clicking is not normal and is a sign that maybe all is not right. Don't ask me why, but my 3 iBooks have been graveyards for hard drives...I've been inside them multiple times to replace drives and I have another to do now. I'm not saying that is going to happen to you or that I am nothing more than the victim of bad luck. What I am saying is...back up the drive NOW.
The next sound you hear could be the lack of sound (lack of spinning) of your hard drive. Clicking is not normal and is a sign that maybe all is not right. Don't ask me why, but my 3 iBooks have been graveyards for hard drives...I've been inside them multiple times to replace drives and I have another to do now. I'm not saying that is going to happen to you or that I am nothing more than the victim of bad luck. What I am saying is...back up the drive NOW.
fmp3 said:
The first thing you should do is absolutely to run Disk Utility. Click on the drive on the left. At the bottom, there should be a line that says S.M.A.R.T. Status. It should say "verified." If it does not (e.g. if it says "failing"), then race against time to backup your data right this second.
Now, assuming it says verified... do you hear a sound sort of like a marble being dropped on a table? If so, some drives seem to make this sound, and it seems to be normal. Mine makes it occasionally, although nowhere near so frequently as once every 5 seconds. When the 2.5" 100GB drives first became available on PBs, there were a number of comments about this drive making that noise frequently, and it appeared to be a non-issue.
For your drive, I would say that if the frequency of this sound has increased substantially, or if the sound characteristics have changed since the time you bought the iBook, then you probably have a problem....
If it's always been this way, it might just be an idiosyncrasy.
I think I hear that 'marble dropping' sound every now and then, but that should be normal. The only other sounds I'm really hearing are tiny little things that just sound like the harddrive is working. However, I have to put my ear right up against the keyboard to hear them. I did fsck and fixed a voume header repair issue a few days ago.
I might just stop by an apple store and tell me what they think about the noise. I just got this refreshed like... 2 weeks ago so it's ******** if the drive is actually failing.
calebjohnston said:
Good luck! Hopefully the Genius bar can tell you more about whether or not to be concerned. Just so you know, fsck and SMART status are two very different things. The former, fsck, fixes logical errors in the file system. SMART applies an algorithm to physical (not logical) attributes of drive performance to determine if predictable drive failure is likely. So if you did an fsck but you haven't checked SMART status, you should still do that, because the fsck did not cover you.
how would I go about checking to see if my smart status is verified? i ran the disk scan utility thing in app/utilities and after the intial time of it saying 'volume header needs minor repair' (which i fixed with fsck), it says everything is fine now.
If you open up disk utility and click on the drive in the left panel, it has a SMART Status: field down at the bottom of the window.calebjohnston said:
Ironically, my PowerBook just died (partially; it now runs off an external and the internal hard drive is now my coffee mug coaster), and it never gave me a SMART warning. Take this with a grain of salt, for I'm not sure the specifics to how I killed my hard drive, but it's possible SMART might not be as DEPENDABLE as it says it is....
SMART status is verified, and the scan from disk utility doesn't come up with any problems. The sound from the hard drive seems to have stopped for the most part too. I think I'm just overly paranoid.
Thanks for all the help guys.
Thanks for all the help guys.