[osxrules]

When I'm using my mac Mini with a few programs open, I occasionally hear the drive making a noise like it's spinning down then up. It's the same noise that happens when you have the sleep hard disk when possible option set to on in energy saver and then you click the mouse or something to wake it up. I usually don't hear it spin down but I hear a beep and then a spin up noise.

The odd thing is that it can go for hours without making the noise once and then do it 3 to 5 times in the space of ten minutes. Sometimes it affects what I'm doing by slowing down the programs I'm using. Even with the 'sleep hard drive when possible' option set to off and my system set to never sleep, my hard drive still does the spin up spin down thing.

Is there a built in energy saving option that is doing this?

[Randman]

Which model do you have? How much ram?

[osxisfun]

its in the system prefs - energy? hard drive sleep

[osxrules]

I have the 1.25 GHz version with 1GB Ram.

The hard drive sleep option is off along with computer sleep set to never.

[liquidtrance123]

i have the same problem, i usually turn my mac off at night as it makes the sound of a dying HD. However if i do a repair permissions and restart it usually goes away. Not sure what it is i just hope it stays alive

[osxrules]

Originally Posted by liquidtrance123

i have the same problem, i usually turn my mac off at night as it makes the sound of a dying HD. However if i do a repair permissions and restart it usually goes away. Not sure what it is i just hope it stays alive

I find it's only doing it sometimes fairly regularly but spaced out. It seems to happen more often at night.

[osxrules]

I found this article:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...165#post209165

Somebody says it's the Finder refreshing - yeah right. I just hope it ain't another Azureus problem. At least it isn't freezing the system this time.

[liquidtrance123]

its not azureus as i do not even have that installed and i get the problem occasionally. Usually after i leave it on for long periods of time. Again, if i run a verify / repair permissions it goes away. Maybe it is finder refreshing itself, but its odd as i dont get this on my ibook and i'm sure no one else gets it on their other macs as we would've heard about it.

I would be positive the ibook would also do it as the ibook and the mini have almost the same parts in them. Besides the motherboard itself i see no real differences. Finder refresh was a good excuse but it just doesn't make sense.

[osxrules]

Oh no, mine has gotten really bad now. It's now doing a slow spin down and up and it's making a buzzing noise. It is going to have to be replaced, I can't work with it like this.

[liquidtrance123]

thats bad i'm gonna have to keep a closer eye on mine

I would get applecare but i figure besides the CPU and the motherboard i can replace all the other parts myself after warranty ends

[osxrules]

Ok so it died for a bit. It kept spinning down really badly and very often. I quickly backed up some of my important files onto dvd. Then I unplugged the firewire DVD burner and all of a sudden my HD starts going ape sh*t and spinning really fast - I thought it was going to blow. I clicked shutdown and it hung up. I then held the power button and restarted. At restart I heard the drive spinning up and down and up and down but it never went past the apple boot sign. So again I shut down via the power switch (I'm sure I saw an orange flash inside the case that time) and unplugged it for about an hour. I've booted it back up to see if I can get anymore files backed up and well, it seems to be ok so far. It's not doing the spinning up/down thing yet and the buzzing is gone. There is a bit of a slight grating sound when accessing files but I think that was there before. There's definitely a problem though because when I used disk utility on the installer disc, it went offline when doing the spinning down and gave an error -10000 couldn't unmount drive.

[liquidtrance123]

Originally Posted by osxrules

(I'm sure I saw an orange flash inside the case that time), it went offline when doing the spinning down and gave an error -10000 couldn't unmount drive.

I"ll pray for your mini tonight

[osxrules]

Wow, prayer really must work. I'm baffled because it seems to be working better than ever. I've heard it spin down once midly since it went really bad. It just seems to have fixed itself. I actually had it in the box for about an hour because I was going to take it to my dealer but then I thought I should try and backup some more stuff. I have also had the experience of taking stuff I thought was broken back, only to discover that it worked fine for my dealer so I wanted to make sure it was broken.

I booted up and there were absolutely no bad noises whatsoever. I did some other tasks and they all ran very well.

The problem with the drive was that it sounded like the drive motor was sticking so maybe it just freed itself up. Maybe some drives have it tough breaking in or something. I actually thought it was charge build up or something as that might account for the sparks and maybe the drive spinning fast and that it being unplugged helped but I just don't know.

Another theory is that my room has been like a greenhouse in the past week or so and that even affected my dvd video recorder so I wonder if that may have been what made it go from mild spinning up/down to really bad.

The thing is, I actually upgraded to a Mini from an ibook because I thought the hard drive in that was getting old and I didn't want it dying. Plus, I had a logic board failure in the ibook. I swore after that I'd backup every week like clockwork. It obviously didn't sink in.

Anyway, it seems to be fine now but hard drives are temperamental so I'll have to keep listening for odd noises. Maybe one day we'll get solid state devices that are cheap enough:

http://www.m-systems.com/Content/Pro...uct.asp?PID=34

They'd be silent too. I think a 2GB IDE is nearly $500 just now so it has a bit to go yet.

I hope your drive settles down ok. The spin up/down is definitely not normal behaviour so backup regularly for now and see what happens. I ran disk utilities and they didn't report anything wrong with the drive until it spun down so it seems to me like a motor problem or maybe something with the hard disk controller.

[liquidtrance123]

I'm glad to hear your drive is ok, mine has seemed to have stopped doing it as much, last night i think it happened twice but before that it was fine for a few weeks. Odd problem but its good to hear your drive is ok

[polendo]

I'm starting to have that problem. I repaired permisions just in case. I will continue using it and see what comes of it.

[osxrules]

I don't think it's a permissions problem for the reason that I never did any repairs to my drive and it seems to be fixed.

My hard drive hasn't done it again since that one time after it started working properly. I've had azureus running 24/7 and not so much as a blip. It's very odd behaviour. I've seen a couple of people posting about this online and it is usually in connection with a Mac Mini. It seems to be standard that each kind of low end Mac has one defining problem:

ibook - logic board
imac G5 - leaky capacitors
and now Mac Mini with the hard drive

Could it be the auto-switching power supply maybe? Perhaps the supply isn't plugged in right. I noticed that my power supply seems to sit very loosely in the back of the machine. My power supply also sits on a carpet so possibly that could cause static bui;d up?

[polendo]

My MM's power supply sits on the carpet. When I get home I will check on those connections .. thanks for the suggestion. I will also check those power settings at OSX.

regards

[turtle777]

This HD behavior is the oddest I have ever read about.
I'm not sure how safe I would feel with that going on. I'd make sure to have a tight backup of everything...

-t

[osxrules]

Ok so I spoke too soon. It did it again last night. I again hurriedly backed up my data. I called my dealer this morning and told him what was happening and this morning discovered that it's working ok now (yet again) - no noises at all. He confirmed what I thought - that if Apple test the HD and it seems ok, they will just return it. It looks like I'll just have to wait until it totally messes up (I'm prepared for weeks of hell ahead).

It definitely sound like it's on the way out because it made the noise like a marble bouncing on a hard surface, which is always a sign of a bad drive and it was buzzing like hell - I was tipping it all ways to get it to stop and that seemed to work. I should just drop it on the floor and be done with it. I actually remembered I had an external hard drive that did exactly the same thing a couple of years ago - spin up/down too and it didn't go wrong until a week later but it started having trouble immediately after getting it. My Mini has taken a couple of months so who knows when it will go completely and then I have to wait for it to go to Apple.

The most annoying bit is that Apple have put those stupid laptop drives in it so I can't even use a spare one from my dealer as he only has the normal kind in store and new ones are expensive. Apart from the graphics card, that probably has to be the thing that frustrates me most about the Mini.

I checked the power supply and although it does seem to attract fluff, I'm not sure static is the problem given that I had a drive that did that before. Anyway, for all those with the same issue, it likely won't get better so backup daily if possible. Use a better system than I was though because I erased one of the DVD+RWs I was using so I could make a more recent backup but my computer froze during the burn. So not only would I have lost the old backup but the new stuff too. I'm going to get more DVD+RWs today.

[polendo]

Well, I started to excercise the hard drive yesterday. I got to open quick time videos /close, office documents and run itunes songs from the hard drive. I did that for like an hour, continously and the hard disk didn't complain at all.. just the normal sound that it does when it access the information (no spin up/down sound). What I plan to do today is just to web surf and see if I hear that spin up/down sound. More on this later.

regards

[osxrules]

It went this morning again. This is really bugging me now. Mainly because I did what I always do and left it unplugged for 2 hours and it starts working fine again but it just kept sticking and freezing before I did that. Loads of people seem to be having the same issues but they just accept it because their system isn't freezing.

It seems to be happening weekly so I'm now back to thinking about the charge build-up again. If it was a drive failure then surely it wouldn't just start working fine for a week after being unplugged for a couple of hours.

My Mini sits on an external dvd burner so could that cause some sort of interference?

I'm so pissed off by it, I'm actually thinking about shelling out for a Hitachi Travelstar E7K60 because it will give me an 8MB cache as opposed to 2MB and 7200rpm as opposed to 5400. My Mini has the Seagate 40GB ST940110A. What pisses me off more is I can't replace the drive myself because of the stupid design. I have to get a dealer to do it. Why the hell did Apple make the things so hard to get into?

It's not like I can use a firewire drive and boot from it because I only have one freakin' port and I use that for my dvd burner.

The other issue is, I don't want to shell out £70 only to discover that it's something the machine is doing to the drives like a faulty hard disk controller:

http://channels.lockergnome.com/it/a..._monitor.phtml

Are there any Mac drive tools that would analyse the entire hard drive setup to maybe give a clue to what's wrong? I've tried software tools for hard drives but they just say the disk is fine until it messes up but then they report the drive is offline. I need something to test disk throughput and errors etc. A diagnostic tool.

SMART has proved to be a waste of time because it keeps coming up verified.

Techtool pro 4 looks like it might help as it says it checks controllers etc. I might check it out.

****
update - I tried techtool pro 4 and it seems to do the full set of tests but they all come back passed. Even when the hard drive spun down, techtool would freeze and wait and then report the drive was ok. That's most likely because I'm running it under the system on the disc I'm analysing. I'll need to make a bootable Tiger disc and use it.

[osxrules]

I don't mean to bump the thread but can I ask what model of hard drive is in your Minis? Check in the Apple System Profiler (apple menu -> about this mac -> more info is one way). Then click ATA. Mine is the ST940110A, which is a Seagate 5400 drive. The model number that Seagate use is ST94011A.

[polendo]

Started doing the same sound again. My Mac mini is the 1.42 model (80 GB), but I can't recall the model of the HD (I'm at the office). What I do remember is that the 80 GB came with slower drives than some 40 GB.

However, I have new info. I have attached with an external enclosure a 40 GB Western Digital HD.. and guess what.. from time to time that particular sound comes from there too. I'm beginning to suspect that OSX does some disk activities on any drive that is attached too.

[osxrules]

Originally Posted by polendo

Started doing the same sound again. My Mac mini is the 1.42 model (80 GB), but I can't recall the model of the HD (I'm at the office). What I do remember is that the 80 GB came with slower drives than some 40 GB.

However, I have new info. I have attached with an external enclosure a 40 GB Western Digital HD.. and guess what.. from time to time that particular sound comes from there too. I'm beginning to suspect that OSX does some disk activities on any drive that is attached too.

That's interesting. Are you running Tiger by the way? I wouldn't think it was a spotlight issue.

I haven't heard anyone mention this problem on other hardware so I don't think Tiger is the problem. It seems to just be a Mini thing. That's why I suspected the drive controllers, which I think are on the motherboard and might account for external hard drives doing the same thing.

I still think my drive might be damaged though because it's been doing much worse things than just an occasional spin up/down. I just wish that if it was going to break that it just would break instead of not working then working etc. It's making me annoyed because I keep using my machine as normal and then it stops working and I think I've lost my data so I quickly try and salvage my stuff only to find it starts working a couple of hours later.

Has your spin up/down ever frozen the OS for a bit and then freed it up after the spin up or does the spin up/down happen without affecting anything?

I found this quote from google:

"The hard drive failure was a mechanical one. I would hear the hard drive spin up, seek for a while, spin down, and then spin up again and repeat. I have had this precise problem before with a couple of hard drives that Apple replaced in my iBook. This is how I can be relatively certain that my RAM upgrade was not the cause of the hard drive failure."

from

http://text.dslreports.com/forum/rem...ys=10~start=40

Is there anyone with a Mac Mini who isn't getting these noises?

[polendo]

Ok , just checked my mac mini drive and is a seagate ST9808210A. Its 4200 rpm, 8 MB cache, 80 GB drive.

Yes, I'm running Tiger. No freezing of any kind.. none whatsoever.. just the sound.

I suspect there is some kind of instruction on Tiger that makes the hd look for information. There is just way too much coincidence that both drives suddenly have made that sound. Right now, both are darn quiet.

[aci_mac]

My Mac Mini (1.42 / 512 / 80) has Panther on it and the drive is quiet as it can be...so it could very well be Tiger doing a Spotlight indexing? Who knows.

[osxrules]

But if Tiger was the problem then surely it would happen on different hardware too. Unless each hardware has separate hard disk drivers.

My system hasn't done the complete freezing up again but the spin down is still there and it does still affect my apps on occasions.

I was considering getting the Hitachi Travelstar 7200 7k60 just to get rid of the noise and at the same time maybe improve performance a bit. It's a lot of hassle though and I don't like paying for stuff I wouldn't have had to pay for if Apple had used some sense when designing the machine.

A few people are saying that after upgrading to a different drive, their problems go away and they think maybe Apple shipped faulty drives. But with hard drives, it's hard to tell and since polendo gets similar behaviour from a different drive, it seems unlikely.

[osxrules]

Well, I'm certain my Mac Mini hard drive is going to die soon so I got an external firewire hard drive. I put a Maxtor 7200 rpm 80GB in a generic case. The case I bought today I think is broken so I used a Lacie case that had my DVD-Writer in it instead.

The Maxtor drive is a bit noisy while seeking but it is not making the spin down noises. I used SuperDuper to clone my drive and everything is working fine. Now concerning performance, I would have thought the 5400 was adequate and I didn't think a firewire HD would be much faster. Then I ran Xbench.

For the 7200 Maxtor firewire drive I get:

sequential
uncached write 4k blocks: 95 (39MB/sec)
uncached write 256k blocks: 70 (28.5MB/sec)
uncached read 4k blocks: 61 (9.7 MB/sec)
uncached read 256k blocks: 92 (37MB/sec)
random
uncached write 4k blocks: 140 (2.1MB/sec)
uncached write 256k blocks: 125 (28MB/sec)
uncached read 4k blocks: 86.5 (0.57MB/sec)
uncached read 256k blocks: 93.5 (19.25MB/sec)

overall score: 89.5

For the internal 5400 Seagate I get:

sequential
uncached write 4k blocks: 80 (33MB/sec)
uncached write 256k blocks: 71 (28.9MB/sec)
uncached read 4k blocks: 25.3 (4 MB/sec)
uncached read 256k blocks: 79.5 (32MB/sec)
random
uncached write 4k blocks: 65 (0.98MB/sec)
uncached write 256k blocks: 68.5 (15.4MB/sec)
uncached read 4k blocks: 68.3 (0.45MB/sec)
uncached read 256k blocks: 74.8 (15.4MB/sec)

overall score: 58.9

The values are averaged over 3 runs for each drive. and each run was fairly consistent. So it shows the overall performance of a 7200 desktop drive is about 50% faster than the 5400 laptop drives in the Mini.

The price difference I discovered is not too bad. The desktop 7200 80GB cost £60 and an 80GB laptop drive would cost £90 but it's still 50% more expensive.

The plus point is the low noise. The desktop 7200 is pretty noisy whereas the Mini is pretty quiet.