Click-noise every 5-30 sec

Question

I've had my MacBook 2ghz regular Late 2008, for about 2 weeks and I've started to notice an annoying sound/noise from (I think) the right corner beside the trackpad and the Optical Drive. My guess is the HDD?
It's actually pretty hard to describe, but it's like a very silent clicking noise coming every 5-30 sec, when using it or not using it (still turned on, though). In my class at day I do not notice it, only at home all alone - not listening to music.
You only hear it in quiet conditions, but I'm pretty much a perfectionist, and this is starting to bother me when trying to focus on something in silence.
Is this an fatal error, or normal? I've tried to look around the forum, and found something looking like it, but I do not like installing some unknown software or keeping the HDD on all the time - like to save batterylife (how do you see when the HDD is being "used" or not?)
Do anyone know this problem, maybe a proper resolve or should i turn it to AppleCare? (Live in DK)
I really hope someone can help me with this. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

http://www.dougitdesign.com/blog.html
11.25.08: Does your hard drive (HDD) ever sound like little mice are playing table tennis inside of it? Or, why your notebook computer's HDD is pre-programmed for quick failure.
My most recent and fresh complaint with Apple has to do with an annoying clicking sound coming from the hard drive (HDD) of my early 2008 Macbook. This is not to be confused with a much louder and constant clicking sound of a soon-to-fail HDD. This is a more subtile, yet annoying click that is most obvious when the computer is not under heavy processing use. I just purchased this product directly from Apple as a refurbished unit. Although the machine is technically a refurb., it is actually completely new, at least the HDD was, as that is easy to check. This "click" sound is yet another example of when a "bug" is actually considered a "feature."
It turns out that this "clicking" is part of a "power management system" that functions to save energy and, more importantly, generate less heat. For every "click" what is happening is the heads of the HDD are parking, and the disk platters begin to stop spinning. But then the HDD's heads quickly unpark, and then park again, and then unpark, and sometimes this happens every couple of seconds and becomes very annoying. It is most especially annoying when using a notebook computer in a very quiet setting. The click(s) can sound just like a ping pong ball being dropped on a hard surface.
This problem is most recognizable when one's computer does not have many applications in use, and is sitting in a fairly idle state, like when one is trying to read from a website through a browser, and not doing much else that will tax the CPU and the HDD. It is when the computer is in this state that the HDD manufacturer's (or is it Apple's/*nix's) power management system and the Operating system seem to not get along too well, and then come the click, click, clicks. What is most bizarre to me is that the clicks are somewhat random, at least to my limited knowledge. Sometimes, in what appear to be similar computer-use situations, there will be clicks, and sometimes no clicks.
This problem actually occurs on all Operating Systems based on Unix/Linux, including the Mac OS. As far as Windows is concerned, many say this problem does not exist, and some say it does. The folks who say that Windows Vista is not plagued with this problem claim it is because the OS accesses the HDD so very often, like every 4 seconds at a minimum, the HDD's aggressive power management scheme never has a chance to kick-in and sleep the HDD and park the heads. Whereas the Mac OS Leopard 10.5 may access, or touch, the HDD every 8 seconds at the least, allowing the HDD's over aggressive power management to sleep the drive (hence park the heads, and make an audible "click") every few seconds. The same seems to apply to open source distros of Linux, however they seem to be on top of a fix. Maybe this is because the average linux user is quite computer-saavy, unlike today's average Mac user.
This issue is not just about an annoying noise emitting from the HDD, all those clicks might be drastically shortening the life of the HDD. To computer geeks each one of those annoying ping-pong ball sounding clicks is known as a "LoadCycleCount" and every HDD manufactured has a limited number of allowable load cycle counts before the HDD fails! My particular drive will fail at around 600,000 load cycle counts. that number may seem high, but considering that the HDD in question is already at 22,731 "clicks" or load cycle counts (this number is easily ascertainable with the use of specific software) in under one month's use, well, do the math. My HDD is pre-programmed to fail in 2 years. Many people have reported a much higher rate of accumulated "clicks" than my HDD has. I have an old external 80 gig firewire HDD that is running strong after 8 years of use!
The big mystery here is who is to blame? It is either the OS manufacturers, i.e. Apple, Windows, Ubuntu, or we need to look at the manufacturers of the HDD's themselves. I actually think they both are to share the blame.
There are numerous forum threads running all over the web about this issue. Here are links to some of the best: (there are also many great threads at Apple's support forums, however Apple will not allow me to create a working link to those threads. Bad Apple, bad.)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=591503
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-258751.html
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