[contagion]

Just got a 12" iBook from Apple Store. My first Apple notebook since PowerBook 1400. I love the portability of this machine, and the airport extreme is amazing.

I'm noticing something strange though. While sitting in a quiet room, I noticed the hard drive making clicking type noises. It does it every 20-30 seconds or so... I closed all apps, and listened again... though it's a little less frequent, I still noticed it. The sounds are similar to sounds I've heard from my iPod HD before...

I guess what this all boils down to is, is anyone else hearing these noises from their drive? Could this be a bad drive? Disk Warrior and Apple HW Test tells me it's fine, but you know how that goes.

Thanks!

[SupahCoolX]

That's just the regular sound of hard drive activity. Even when you close all other apps, Mac OS X still has processes running in the backgroung (indexing, networking, etc).
As long as it's a light "clicking" sound and not any sort of screeching/clunking/banging, there's nothing to worry about.

[MartiNZ]

I have the same thing with my 12" iBook 800MHz, and it is a bit annoying - I don't think it is additional to the normal idle thinking clicks, or at least louder than it needs to be, and I didn't have the same with my previous 600MHz iBook. Regardless, I've now had this machine for more than a year and the noise has caused no problems.

[Ambassadeur]

As far as the clicking noise is concerned, I experience the same noise with my old clamshell iBook 366 after upgrading the harddrive to a 40 gig IBM travelstar. It hasn't been there before with the old drive, I am pretty sure about that.

And after turning the iBook off, there is another unusual sound after the screen gets dark, like a force parking of the drive, but so far this seems to be "normal" and I didn't have any problems for over half a year now.

[cryon]

yeah, as said before. the clicking sound is normal. my harddrive makes a very light clicking sound once in a while, but it's hardly noticeable if i dont listen especially for that sound.

My previous laptop was an IBM thinkpad, its harddrive was making clicking sounds all the time, very annoyng, but i guess it was normal... i mean, Windows has a love for reading, swapping and keep the disk spinning at all time

[contagion]

Thanks everyone. I guess I'm just being paranoid, after spending money I probably shouldn't have spent in the first place!

[pat++]

The noise is actually the heads of the hard disk which are automatically parked after a period of inactivity. You can use APM Tuner to change the power management settings and remove this noise completely (put the hightest possible value with the slider).

[tmjf_sifu]

i don't have this noise on my 14" at all. in fact, mine is totally silent and my girlfriend was amazed by the silence. her toshiba fan comes on every 10 seconds. ANNOYING!

holden mcgroin

[Ambassadeur]

Originally posted by pat++:
The noise is actually the heads of the hard disk which are automatically parked after a period of inactivity. You can use APM Tuner to change the power management settings and remove this noise completely (put the hightest possible value with the slider).

Are they parked after 30 seconds? My reoccurring noise appears at these intervals and the drive is still spinning afterwards, so I am not sure whether this means they park all the time. The noise is very faint, nothing you'll notive immediately, but when listening to music at a very low volume in an otherwise silent environment, you might hear it.

But again, this has been there from day one with the new travelstar harddrive and I am not worried about it.

[pat++]

Originally posted by Ambassadeur:
Are they parked after 30 seconds? My reoccurring noise appears at these intervals and the drive is still spinning afterwards, so I am not sure whether this means they park all the time.

It seems to vary depending on the harddisk between 10 and 30seconds.