Hard drive makes plunking and clicking noises after Firmware Update

My Macbook hard drive worked fine for 9 months until I installed the EFI Firmware Update 1.1 a few months ago. The hard drive then started making plunking or clicking noises every 30 seconds or so, which is beyond annoying. Eventually, I became worried, backed up my data and took it to Apple to get the hard drive replaced. They replaced my 120gb Toshiba drive with a new 120gb Fujitsu drive and it does the same exact thing.
Apparently the plunk is the sound of the drive head parking on the disk. I am now pretty certain nothing is wrong with my hard drives but something was changed during a Firmware or Software Update that tells my hard drive to park the disk head every 30 seconds. Ive found a few other similar cases on the internet. The drive seems to function fine otherwise.
I know two other people with Macbooks and their hard drives don't make the same noise as mine despite having the same drives. Ive tried two hard drives now, Ive tried various power settings, disk utility doesn't find any issues and performance hasn't suffered. Its just an incredibly irritating sound every 30 seconds that is driving me crazy.
I don't want to learn to just deal with it because its annoying and distracting, and is possibly something created from an update.
Anybody have any ideas?
Thanks,
Ed

Hi, welcome to Discussions,
You may have seen some of the various threads about this on this forum. There were many last year (summer 2006) and I've noticed some recently:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5747020&#5747020
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1226956&tstart=0
None of the threads last year provided any "fixes" as far as I remember, the way people are attempting hacks above.
I had the parking-like sound (never found out if it really was parking) on three consecutive Seagate 80Gb drives in a first generation MacBook Core Duo. It would start after about a day and a half after receiving it, presumably after Spotlight had finished indexing and the drive was then being left idle. The drives were perfect otherwise, and whisper quiet (which made the thunking sound easier to hear). Finally the Apple Store in Brent Cross, London determined that the sound was normal, saying these newfangled smaller SATA drives make such sounds which are normal to their operation. I decided to drop my concern, because the drive (#3!) was working fine.
Your experience is interesting because it seems to relate the offending drive action to the EFI Firmware Update. In my own case my MacBook was replaced last month because of a different issue and the new one (Core 2 Duo – yay!) has a Hitachi 120 Gb which is noisier in general, but no clunks to be noticed yet.
Good luck!
Rhys

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Hard drive is emitting a clicking noise

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Yes. It is normal to hear a clicking noise whenever a Mac portable is moved.
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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1935#

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I have had my Macbook for 2 years in March, and last night I discovered that my hard drive started making a scratching/whirring/clicking noise every now and then, also, it has been playing up really badly. It seems to be whenever I try to access certain files or applications, and if I do, my Macbook will completely freeze up and can take up to a minute or two to fix itself.
So, in a panic, today I bought an external hard drive (a 1TB My Book for Mac) to back up in fear that my hard drive would crash, but whenever I tell Time Machine to back up, the progress stops in the same spot (1.09GB out of 105GB) and after a few minutes gives me an error message saying that the hard drive cannot be read.
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Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook
Model Identifier: MacBook4,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.1 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 1 GB
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SMC Version (system): 1.31f0
Serial Number (system): *********
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DenholOliver wrote:
Forgot to say the computer will not start up and goes to a white screen.
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See this
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Ha... "Cheers" is not convincing coming from an angry man like you.
In English PC stands for Personal Computer:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=personal%20computer
and
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Hi HailGalvatron,
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How much noise should the hard drive make on a MBP early 2011?
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http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/
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Hard drive makes plunking and clicking noises after Firmware Update

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