annoying sound after HD replacement

[nautisch]

hey there

went for the wd passport 250 drive, carbon copy cloned my disk, exchanged drives, worked all pretty smooth with the tutorials found here, boot up, everything running fine.

weird thing is a sqiekish sound, just like the one you can silence by starting photo booth or quiet mbp (have the june 2006 model). sometimes its there, sometimes not. not depending on power adapter. not silencable via photo booth.......

im wondering if it is caused by the harddrive (didnt hear it when it was running in the external usb case while cloning..) or if i maybe did something wrong during the replacement procedure... (but what could that be...)


except for the sound, the disk replacement is fairly easy, takes about half an hour......

 

[Makosuke]

I don't have any good answer, but there's a test you could do to figure out if it's the hard drive:

First, do something that's going to hit the drive hard--duplicate a big file in the Finder or something. Then listen--if it makes the sound while grinding on that, then stops when the action is done, it's just the drive seeking.

If that isn't it, then it's probably not the drive--the only sound a drive should make if it's not seeking is the background whine of the motor, and I assume that'd be the same as in an external case. You could set the drive to go to sleep on inactivity and wait a while until it does, just to double check with it installed, though.

One note if it DOES turn out to be the drive--it's always possible that the slight vibration from the drive is at a resonant frequency of something in your 'Book and that's why it sounds different now. That'd surprise me a bit in a laptop, but I do have an external case that makes a weird periodic buzzing sound because the drive it in is at almost exactly the same frequency as its fan.