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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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.
You can find the apps I have mentioned with a quick google.

Why is my hard drive full when I only have the operating system loaded and nothing else? No pics, music, nothing...It's the 60 Gig hard drive on the air built in late 2010.

Why is my hard drive full when I'm only running the operating system and nothing else is loaded? No music, pics, nothing! I understand the hard drive is small at 60 gig, but I can't believe the os would take up that much space.

First, empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space. According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB free on the startup volume for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. Use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved. ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To really see everything, you have to run it as root. Back up all data now. Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways: ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.) ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens. ☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid. After installing ODS in the Applications folder, drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. When you're done with it, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Why does my hard drive state I have used 500 gb when I have only used 280 gb?

Why does my hard drive state I have used 500 gb when I have only used approximately 280 gb?

Have you emptied your trash lately...
Also... See these links...
Apple ML = Increase Disc Space
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10677
See Here > Where did my Disk Space go?
And Here > The Storage Display

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
Results of Your Ideal Business-Class Laptop survey, concluded 2009-07-29.
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Why is my hard drive mostly backups?

Why is my hard drive full of backups?
Okay, my computer was running low on storage space, so I decided to clean it up. Now, my storage tab in "about this mac" looks like this:
What happened? Is there a secret folder somewhere where I can delete all these backups? I have a 2009 macbook pro that has seen better days, and I am currently running on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1. My computer doesn't run well after it has less than 100gb of free space left. Can someone please help? I would get another mac, but I don't have the money. Thanks to anyone who can help!

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

Why is my hard drive requiring authentication before allowing me to drag documents to it?

Why is my hard drive requiring authentication before allowing me to drag documents to it?

Why do you even think it needs defraginng, your iMac is not an old MS Windows machine?. Defragging HD's is a very antiquated and unneccessary thing to do. Even current MS Windows machines don't need it.

Why do new hard drives keep failing in Mac Mini OSX Server?

Why new new hard drives keep failing in Mac Mini OSX server?

If it only failed in 8 days.. I just return the drives back to newegg and get a different brand like western digital. NewEgg has a 30 day return policy.
If you deal with any hard drive manufacturer now, they will give you a refurbished item and not a new item that you are entitled.
As for testing hardware....
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509
even if it still passed Apple tests.. it does not mean logicboard is fine..... it just means it passes the tests.
At this point, If i were you, I would just go back to NewEgg and send back the Seagates letting know they are bad and prefer a different brand such as Western Digital.
Install the Western Digitals and see how long they last. If they fail again in a a short amoung of time, it's the logicboard then.
This is based on experience in dealing with repairs with Macs, PCs, and other various kinds of Servers and computers over the last 10+ years.
In fact, One of my clients who has a Dual 4-core Intel Xeon Server with a Supermicro logicboard, one of their SATA drive ports are bad. Every 4 months like clock work the Mirror RAID Drive would degrade on that port. Then after figuring out that the drives are not necessary bad, I swapped to using another spare SATA port and since then no problems.

Portable hard drive clicking but it isn't a hardware problem

Here's what I have so far:
A portable hard drive bought via ebay
A desktop that only runs arch (main computer)
A desktop that only runs ubuntu (guest computer)
The hard drive clicks (about 4 times per second) when plugged into the arch desktop regardless of which usb port/hub it's plugged into.
The hard drive works perfectly when plugged into the ubuntu desktop's usb ports.
The hard drive does not show up on lsusb on the arch desktop.
The hard drive is apple branded but the enclosure/adapter definitely isn't. I don't think this makes a difference.
My main question is: What now?
edit: sifted through some logs for a while and didn't find anything.
I'm thinking that because nothing shows up in lsusb there is a problem recognizing the sata-usb adapter.
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 ?
Is the drive drawing excess current ?? A USB device is not supposed to draw in excess of 100mA unless it negotiates with the host for more. Not all USB controllers respond well to devices that violate this.

Hard drive clicks a lot

I just got my iPod and everytime I play a song, the hard drive clicks for about 2 seconds. I can feel it and I can also hear it too. Is this normal?
Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Is it clicking or is it just the HD spinning and the iPod loading up the song?
Or do you hear this through the headphones?
Try comparing it to another 5G iPod. Is yours the same?
btabz

Hard drive clicking sound when MBP in motion

Hi all,
I just bought the new 15" 2.53 GHz MacBook Pro with the SD card slot, and I noticed that every time I move the machine vertically (i.e. upwards or downwards), I hear a hard drive clicking sound. Sounds like a single chirp... if anybody knows what I'm talking about. What's wrong with this, or is this natural?
Thanks.

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
I found this under a different thread in this forum. Other users are hearing this when they "bump" the right side of the laptop or when they suddenly move the laptop.

Macbook Pro 13' freezes for 10 secs and hard drives clicks

Hi all,
I recently purchased a macbook pro 13" and it has started to make clicking noises every now and again (but it doesn't beep). The mac is also starting to freeze for about 5-10secs and then returning to normal.
The hard drive inside the macbook pro is a 160GB model.
Does anyone know why this is happening and how i can solve it?
Many thanks

Contact Apple. It sounds like a hard drive issue. It may need to be replaced.
Dave M.
MacOSG Founder/Ambassador  An Apple User Group  iTunes: MacOSG Podcast
Macsimum News Associate Editor  Creator of 'Mac611 - Mobile Mac Support'

Why is my Hard drive info not displaying the correct availability

I can open "About This MAC" and click on more info it lets me check my hard disk usage under storage. It shows I have 81 GB available of 499.76. However it shows 98 GB of Backups, what could that be?
Now when I actually right click on Macintosh HD it says I have 437.22 GB available of 499.25 GB. I just don't understand, and I don't believe either is right. If I right click my user file in MAcintosh HD it says I have 165 GB on disc. What gives?

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
That's normal. OS X Lion and Mountain Lion, when you have turned on Time Machine, create "local snapshots" on the hard drive of portable Macs. See > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
One of the "features" of local snapshots is that Disk Utility detects them as used space and Finder detects them as free space. That's the reason why you are seeing different free spaces depending on the application you use. There's nothing wrong in making local snapshots

Why is my hard drive split up like this?

Ok so my hard drive is split up into five different parts. I have a 1 TB by the way. They are:
the C: drive-902 GB
Unallocated-28GB
Hidden 400MB
System 260MB
Hidden 391MB
Anyway can anyone tell me why its split up that way? Can I somehow allocate the 28Gb to the c drive? And what are the hidden drives?
If you need more info let me know. I'm trying to learn as much about computers as possible because I want to work in IT someday and right now i just don't know what info is relevent. BTW I'm running windows 8 64 bit.
Thanks!
REALteetz

Hi
Please find the link given below might help you to fix your issue.
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-use-unallocated-drive-space-in-windows.html
Let us know how it goes!
"I work for HP."
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Manjunath

Why does the hard drive park so often?

My mac mini is a few weeks old, and works fine except the hard drive heads park (that annoying click noise) every 10-20 seconds, and it is quite annoying to hear it. I don't understand why they would design it to park so often, as it probably can't be too good for the hard drive's longetivity. Is there anything I can do or am I stuck with a dumb design like this?

If you do a search on hard drive "clunking" or clicking you'll see that it's a common problem, I'm just wondering if anyone has any updates on why it happens. I don't believe apple will replace the hard drive since it hasn't failed nor does my computer have any issues besides the audible noise.

Why is my hard drive clicking?

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