HDD ridiculous parking (spinning down) and clicking issue

I have an original Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa) with upgraded hdd Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200.4 ST9500420AS.
The disk is parking and spinning down in ridiculous moments, it can park itself every two seconds for ten times when I browse the web with a loud "click" and a froze the mac for a second. It helps to use hdapm and set the disk apm to max, but this is not a solution.
This is not the beep+click issue on the unibody Macbook Pros.
Is it a Seagate fault or the power management setting in Macbook Pro?

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
One thing to check is that your Seagate is not the model with the G-Force feature, which is Seagate's version of a sudden motion sensor. If your serial number is correct and there is no "G" at the end, then it should not be. If you do have the drive with the G-Force, you may need to disable Apple's built in Sudden Motion Sensor. Here are some links links where you can read about this:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1935
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1934
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1901090&tstart=0
Another possibility is a problem with the new drive. You can do a comprehensive check of the physical health of the drive with S.M.A.R.T. Utility:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/32454
You can download the demo and run it several times for free.
Using these links, you should be able to evaluate the Seagate drive and decide if it is the problem or not.
Good luck!

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Hi All,
Just got my 24" iMac and love it.
However after 1 day in operation, I noticed something weird about the hard drive (1TB Hitachi):
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I do not have the 1TB drive in my iMac so without hearing the sound it's hard to judge. I have heard drives make sound like you described and there been nothing wrong with it. It may just be the resonance from the drive spinning down. However like yourself I'd be a bit concerned as well. I would start by making sure you have your data backed up then run some diagnostics on the drive.
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2. Verify the directory- Open Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility select the drive on the left then click on Verify Disk.
3. Surface Scan- If you have Apple Care install TechTool Deluxe from the disk provided. Run TechTool and select the Surface Scan option. This will check every block on the drive.
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Quote from: RemusM on 12-November-13, 22:13:36
The spinners (mechanical HDDs) don't even reach the SATA II bandwidth.
Not even close.
On the other hand, AHCI does not improve the performances on them.
So if you really need AHCI, use a SATA II port and see how it goes.
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(for SATA RAID and AHCI mode):
http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z77A-GD65.html#/?div=Driver&os=Win7%2064
Then... why HDD's SATA 3.0 are manufactured?
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I have an Intel iMac 3.06 (April 2008). Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard especially when I am using itunes (9.02) (downloading) the hard drive spins down for no reason at all.The energy settings are fine. The only option I have is to hold the power button down for 5 sec and reboot when it happens. I know this has been an issue with other intel iMacs but when the "fix" for other machines was available it said my machine did not need it. I beg to differ. This is getting very annoying as I am sure it is not doing the hard drive any good having to hard reboot all the time.
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Hi David
Welcome to Apple Discussions
1. In the Energy Saver preference try setting Computer sleep: to "Never" and make sure the the box "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" is unchecked.
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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543
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Suddenly my external drives are acting very strange.
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Perhaps a basic question but is "Sys Pref" - "Energy Saver" - "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible" enabled?
Perhaps try Topher's tip in this article (setting no spindown time via Terminal)?
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10346924-263.html
/p

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Last edited by yuvadm (2013-08-22 10:26:08)

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Drives constantly spinning down and then up again - poor hard drives!

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You know, it sometimes helps to be specific.
Drive make, model, even firmware.
Seagate had a bunch of drives last year that would take 90 minutes to wake from sleep that drove people crazy (but seemed to be mostly or more common with iMac).
Hardware Monitor has a warning and probably something in the readme (those things you are suppose to read before installing?).
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Hi,
I'm working on my new MacBook Pro i7 with a 500GB 7200rpm HDD for a week now and noticed that altough the screen goes to sleep the hdd doesn't.
I've double checked and reset the energy settings. I've even deleted the plist files for it. I've also repaired disk permissions.
Still the slight humming is audible and I can even feel the vibration of the drive (which I learned is normal on the unibody MBPs) long after the screen went black.
Besides being a little noisy it also eats lots of battery power and that's a real problem in combination with the almost constant use of the nvidia gfx chips.
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Sounds like the sleep problem that we're all having with the 2010 MacBook Pro's...
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HDD ridiculous parking (spinning down) and clicking issue

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