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Way to temporarily 'turn off' hard drive?
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I will try that. I havent looked under the hood yet but if thats possible will the rest of the machine still run? (fans still spin, etc)? I'm not sure what else would be making nosie other than the fans and hdd but I need everything running normally, besides the hard drive, of course.
Basicly I just need the disk to go to sleep but the machine still run...
I turned the rpm of my fans up to 3500 from 2000 and couldn't hear a difference, so I am assuming its mostly the hdd (most noise is coming from lower right hand corner, where the hdd resides).
GGJstudios said:
I don't really need to 'run' it, but need any necessary files to be loaded into ram. I guess if hot swapping is supported than just removing the hdd will work... Wish me luck.
It'll still run if you disconnect the HDD while it's running.
Thats what I needed to hear. Thanks
Does THE noise fade a bit or go away when you put your hand on the bottom right corner? That's what happens with mine. The serve provider told me I need to replace it because it's not supposed to make this noise but engineers at Apple told me it IS supposed to make this noise.
It's annoying when I do my editing. I need my mbp to be as quiet as the last one!
Yes the noise fades slightly when pressure is applied.
I unplugged the drive while booted and my macbook got so quiet, I thought it had turned off, but it was still running. Without the hard drive I could barely notice the fan at all, and that was with the back casing still removed.
Most definitely need to replace the drive... I have heard good things about WD's blue series (supposedly very quiet?), but might just play it safe what an SSD. Any recommendations on a SSD?
I posted a thread about this last week. In a nutshell, all of my previous Apple laptops have been silent unless/until I was doing something "complicated." During my normal minimal usage pattern, quiet was the norm.
On my new 2010 MBP 13", I noticed the hard drive "running" all the time, instead of seeming to whir to life only very occasionally. I did have "Put disk to sleep (i.e. spin down) when possible" checked in the Energy Saver Prefs. Still, it is always running.
Well, in my threads, it was determined that this spin down pref is *only* for external drives, not for the main hard drive in your computer. Apparently that can never spin down.
I will admit I'm confused, because they really did seem to spin down in my other laptops. But OTOH, I am a rank computer amateur, so I figured maybe my older hard drives were always "running" but just silently, and then they were just running at a louder higher speed when I called on them to do more work?
But then just today I was reading Anandtech's really good and extensive review of the new MBP's, and I read this in the review:
Light Web Browsing
Here we're simply listing to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds.
The display is kept at 50% brightness, all screen savers are disabled, but the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if there's no disk activity. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work. The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.
Well now this seems to indicate that my original understanding was correct, and that internal hard drives do have the ability to spin down under light use. So now I'm really confused My typical usage is exactly what they are talking about above, and apparently their hard drive spins down during such use, unless I'm completely mis-understanding them.
So now I'm feeling frustrated, as I hate having an issue that I can't get to the bottom of. Whether I can fix it or not is secondary, but I want to understand how it is supposed to work!
On my new 2010 MBP 13", I noticed the hard drive "running" all the time, instead of seeming to whir to life only very occasionally. I did have "Put disk to sleep (i.e. spin down) when possible" checked in the Energy Saver Prefs. Still, it is always running.
Well, in my threads, it was determined that this spin down pref is *only* for external drives, not for the main hard drive in your computer. Apparently that can never spin down.
I will admit I'm confused, because they really did seem to spin down in my other laptops. But OTOH, I am a rank computer amateur, so I figured maybe my older hard drives were always "running" but just silently, and then they were just running at a louder higher speed when I called on them to do more work?
But then just today I was reading Anandtech's really good and extensive review of the new MBP's, and I read this in the review:
Light Web Browsing
Here we're simply listing to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds.
The display is kept at 50% brightness, all screen savers are disabled, but the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if there's no disk activity. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work. The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.
Well now this seems to indicate that my original understanding was correct, and that internal hard drives do have the ability to spin down under light use. So now I'm really confused
My typical usage is exactly what they are talking about above, and apparently their hard drive spins down during such use, unless I'm completely mis-understanding them.So now I'm feeling frustrated, as I hate having an issue that I can't get to the bottom of.
Whether I can fix it or not is secondary, but I want to understand how it is supposed to work!I tried letting computer idle with this setting enabled and the disk never seemed to slow down... Maybe anandtech misunderstood that feature as well?
Just an aspect that's also of some consideration: Solid State Drives run at a lower temp, so theoretically the fans should run less as well because less cooling should be needed under identical usage. I mean, don't computers have built in thermostats to manage everything's temperature? I'd not muddle around with the fans so much because of that, so with a solid state drive, your computer will probably be as quiet as feasibly possible. Definitely none of that familiar hard drive churning at the very least, well unless you use a rotational one for storage in which case you're not really helped on this front at all...
Wanting a home theater P.C. or somethin'?
Wanting a home theater P.C. or somethin'?
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