[nmr]

Before this i didn't notice but my harddrive wasnt making any read write acess noise, but there was no noise. Now after the 10.4.3 update it started but im not sure if its coincidence. Everytime i launch a program the noise comes and even if i hover over the osx dock, it does that. HELP!!! And my ibook is brand new less than 3 months. Oh yea SMART is ok. Any suggestions?

[frdmfghtr]

In the activity monitor, take a look at all running processes, sorted by % CPU use. That will give you a clue as to which process is accessing the drive. My first thought is that it could be Spotlight indexing the drive. Try leaving the machine run overnight and see if it is still accessing the hard drive.

[psk-ele]

Also, you could check your power settings. Normally, Apple has the HD going to sleep whenever it isn't being used. This cycling from sleep to on can cause HD spin-up noises and clicking. The clicking is actually the read/write head, its docking and undocking to access the HD.

Another thing you can do is see if your free memory is too low. If you run out of main memory, your computer will start thrashing, which means it is using only virtual memory (your HD) to read/ and write data to, which causes the noises to happen very often. So following frdmfghtr's advice, check the CPU% and the memory usage of apps.

If you set your HD to never sleep, you shouldn't get as many clicks and spin-ups and downs, but this could potentially lead to shorter HD life, and since iBooks are meant to be portable, the more work the HD is doing, the more moving parts, and the more the risk for mechanical failure (or worse, a head crash on the HD platter).

Hope this helps....