T500 Hard Drive Clicking (tick tick tick)

This noise is dirving me crazy. I have a new laptop. Please refer to article below from a link that also mentions this noise problem and please provide solution.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking
Problem with hard drive clicking: sometimes described as a repeating tick tick tick type of ticking sound. The Hitachi Travelstar 5K80 series which shipped with many T series Thinkpads in particular is reported to suffer from this problem. The clicks occur rapidly, and are quiet but noticeable. While in use in a quiet environment the clicks can be relatively loud and very irritating to some users. The clicks seem to happen when the drive is idle and the power has been on for a significant period of time. The clicking is also reported on other vendor's laptop hard drives too and is therefore almost certainly a hard drive related rather than a laptop
chassis related.
The clicking sound appears to only occur when the drive is idle. Forcing the drive to be busy silences the ticking while the drive is busy. Launching programs that access the hard drive such as searching or defragmenting the drive helps for a time. Cycling the power on the hard drive such as through a full power off reboot of the system stops the ticking for the moment and has been used as a temporary solution. Also see use of hdparm for another way to reset the drive without a power off reboot.
Others recommend using Hitachi's drive feature tool to increase the acoustic management level, and/or set power management settings.

Hi faraz,
Have you tried Hitachi's Feature Tool as suggested? Hitachi has removed the acoustic management function in the latest version, but I think the power management setting is the one you want anyway. Set your drive for maximum performance / max power.
Good luck,
Frank
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Here's what I have so far:
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Last edited by z.s.tar.gz (2011-05-18 03:02:30)

Is the drive self powered, or is it powered from the USB bus ?
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Welcome to Apple Discussions!
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Hi all,
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I think I have found our problem. We are not alone on this one. It actually concerns me after reading about this. Here is the link.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1935
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If the drive is making clicking sounds then it will probably fail. That's evidence of a mechanical issue. DW isn''t going to fix that nor will Disk Utility. Only replacing it with a new drive will fix it. While you can you should make a backup.

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Hi,
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Postive. Each time I hear the tick, each time the SMART attribute report one more Load/unload cycle count.
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Thanks and regards,
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any harddisk that make any unusual mechanical noises probably means the the harddisk will die soon
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Don't pm me for help! That's what the forum is for. Also, Google's nicer than me. Ask him.

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Hi all,
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Contact Apple. It sounds like a hard drive issue. It may need to be replaced.
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Macsimum News Associate Editor  Creator of 'Mac611 - Mobile Mac Support'

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Hmm..Fredic is right. I've noticed you talk about your IPod. Now is the time to take some action if the HD proves unstable. They will ask for your OS discs that came with your computer so that they return your computer to to its original status. They may update the latest 10.4.8 for you and the new 7.0.2 ITunes but you you may have to update yourself. To save your entite ITunes library before your HD fails, go to the IPod + ITunes tab on the top of this page and go to tutorials. In the IPod tutoral, on page 15 is a cool video that will demonstrate how to turn your IPod into a HD, and copy all your ITunes library music. When your Imac is returned with a new HD, you can simply transfer the info from your IPOD-as-a HD , to the new ITunes and then change your IPOD back . What you've done here is to mimic the procedure of copying your ITunes to a HD as if you've bought a new computer, which in a manner of speaking you've done, since this is a new HD. The only disadvantage of this method to using other 3rd party software is that half of your IPod memory must be freed up in order for this to be effective. Best of luck, MonsieurG.

Why is my hard drive clicking?

i have a parrallels desktop installed on my mac. every time im using parallels theres a clicking noise coming from my hard drive. Why???

It's dying.
Common symptoms of a dying hard drive
Hard drive is making a clicking, whirring, grinding, ping pong ball noise or any other type of unusual noises.
Hard drive is not spinning.
Computer is not recognizing the hard drive.
Sluggish loading of applications.
System freezes and hangs.
An interesting site - Hard Drive Sounds by drive manufacturer.

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whenever i carry my macbook, the hard drive makes a clicking sound. Is this the sudden motion sensor?

Yes. Depending on what you mean by "carry", you should probably put it to sleep or turn it off when moving it.

ThinkPad T500 Hard Drive "Holder" Part Number(s)??

I have a ThinkPad T500 ca. late 2008, I want to buy another hard drive "holder" for it just like the one holding the existing hard drive.
Is this available at the parts store, what are the part number(s) involved??
Can someone please point me in the right direction??
Thank you, Tom

GMAC-R60 wrote:
what does the x300 look like I've not seen one
The X300 uses 1.8inch HDD, the rails will not be able to hold the smaller drive if it's able to hold T500's 2.5'' drive. Also, X3xx series doesn't require HDD caddy. I think this is what lead_org meant.
Hope this helps.
Maliha (I don't work for lenovo)
ThinkPads:- T400[Win 7], T60[Win 7], IBM 240[Win XP]
IdeaPad: U350
Apple:- Macbook Air [Snow Leopard]
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Why is my hard drive clicking when idle?

It seems this only happens in Lightroom. There is a constant click, like a hard drive head seek, once a second. I don't have Lightroom doing anything in the background like building thumbnails, but instead is just sitting idle there for hours. When I close LR, it stops imediately.
It has been doing this in LR since I can remember, like maybe years.
It's mildly annoying, and moderately worrying that my HD is getting extra wear and tear. Anyone else notice this, or have an idea why it's happening?
Thanks!

LR is hard on disks because it uses them a lot, more or less constantly (rather than at the end when saving as something like PS does, or only when rendering as with a Video editing application). It is reading and writing to the disk where the catalog and previews are and when in develop mode also to wherever the cache is located. If you also have write xmp to file selected it is writing to the disk they are located to as well.
Unfortunately you cannot separate the previews from the catalog, but everything else can be split onto different disks which both speeds up things generally as well as giving less wear to your disks.
If you can hear a disk over the sound of your cooling, unless you have a water cooled system you most likley have hot hard drives (or maybe not enough cooling fans, or both). Hard drives running at much more than room temperature fail quickly. Anything over 35 C and they fail very quickly. Clicking usually means that yet another location on the drive is being written off. eventually this will lead to failure. To much movement of the heads means a fragmented drive and/or one with too little free space. For an aplication like LR I would always want at least 25 % or more free disk space wherever the catalog is located.
Any noise from a hard drive, other than the start up whine that sometimes comes with some drives after they have been shut down completly, is bad news. I would run whatever checks are available on your OS first, although Windows checks are not that good. CPUID HW Monitor is free and will give you a good idea of the temperatures your disks are running at as long as SMART is enabled in the BIOS. If one drive is running a lot hotter than other then that will be the problem one.
HDD Regenerator claims to be able to regenerate disks. You can download a free trail. I am not at all sure about its claims to fix drives, but in trial mode it will soon show where the problems are and can be run within windows.
I have lots of drives on my systems as I also do some video editing as wekll as stills. I have experienced lots of drives going bad over the years. The one investment I made last year that certainly imporves drive read times and hopefully will delay drive failures (as well as good cooling) was a copy of Diskeeper. This constantly defrags drives in the background and hardly uses any RAM or CPU time to do it, an excellent aplication for anybody running lots of hard drives on a windows based box.
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HT4718 Installed new hard drive, click on restore from time machine, get to 'select a destination' but just keeps searching for disks.. any help please?

Installed new hard drive and want to restore from time machine.
Get as far as 'select a destination' then it goes no further - just keeps 'searching for disks'
Help anyone please?

1. Be sure your drive is attached and mounted.
2. If you have already written any data to the drive, back it up before proceeding to the next step.
3. In the Finder, choose Go > Utilities. The /Applications/Utilities folder will open.
4. Launch Disk Utility.
5. Click the icon for your external hard drive in the sidebar on the left.
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8. Enter a name for the external hard drive in the Name field.
9. Click the Erase button.
Make Sure that you choose the correct drive

T500 Hard Drive Clicking (tick tick tick)

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