Mac Pro harddrive insanely loud?

[rylin]

Hey,
been tracking my new Mac Pro for the past few days, eagerly awaiting the delivery like a kid on christmas (my colleagues are starting to hate me ;-) ).
Today, it finally arrived.

That said, I've bumped into issues.
On the first boot, a colleague and I were amazed at how quiet the system was.
A few updates and a reboot later, the drive starts making a lot of noise.

Now, maybe it's just me being paranoid and not having another Mac Pro to compare with, but when I say loud, I mean very loud.

My rig at home has 7 250GB disks in it (5 samsung, 2 wd).
The only time I notice disk sounds on the rig at home is when the drives are spinning up (the rest is drowned out by the icky fans, I'm sure ;-) ).

Anyhoo,
(working my way towards the question)
Is the Mac Pro HD supposed to be very loud, or should I call AppleStore?
It's not that I can't get spare drives for the office, it's more a question of "Doctor! Doctor! Is my baby ok?"

 

[MacProDude]

Does it sound noisy when the system is idle? Does it sound like it's continually accessing/seeking?

It might just be spotlight indexing. Give it some time, it might just go away.

 

[rylin]

Does it sound noisy when the system is idle? Does it sound like it's continually accessing/seeking?

It might just be spotlight indexing. Give it some time, it might just go away.

Doesn't make a sound when idle.
On bootup and disk reads/writes though, it makes a lot of noise.

It's not exactly the click of death, but it doesn't really sound healthy either.
I was thinking it could've been spotlight, but after the indexing was complete, it went back to being virtually noiseless up until I gave it some stuff to do (dd to create a 1gb file).

 

[MacProDude]

honestly, that isn't sounding promising.

My Mac Pro is so freakin quiet that the HD sound is very noticeable in a quiet room, but it isn't *loud* by any stretch.

 

[rylin]

This is interesting.
Having read reports about people getting 60MBps write speeds to the harddrive, I wanted to do some time/speed-testing of my own.

rylin:~/Desktop rylin$ time dd if=/dev/urandom of=tst.lol bs=10240 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 85.681237 secs (11951275 bytes/sec)

That's 12 MBps; crazy!
In other words, I guess my HD's fubar.

 

[petite]

Try running hardware test from the install cd and see if any errors come up.

 

[Macmadant]

Hey,
been tracking my new Mac Pro for the past few days, eagerly awaiting the delivery like a kid on christmas (my colleagues are starting to hate me ;-) ).
Today, it finally arrived.

That said, I've bumped into issues.
On the first boot, a colleague and I were amazed at how quiet the system was.
A few updates and a reboot later, the drive starts making a lot of noise.

Now, maybe it's just me being paranoid and not having another Mac Pro to compare with, but when I say loud, I mean very loud.

My rig at home has 7 250GB disks in it (5 samsung, 2 wd).
The only time I notice disk sounds on the rig at home is when the drives are spinning up (the rest is drowned out by the icky fans, I'm sure ;-) ).

Anyhoo,
(working my way towards the question)
Is the Mac Pro HD supposed to be very loud, or should I call AppleStore?
It's not that I can't get spare drives for the office, it's more a question of "Doctor! Doctor! Is my baby ok?"

Maybe it's because the machine is so quiet your notice the drives making a noise, when i went from my powermac 6500 to my "windtunnel" G4 i couldn't hear the HDs because the fan noise is greater, where as my 6500 all i could hear was horrible HD noises

 

[danielbriggs]

This is interesting.
Having read reports about people getting 60MBps write speeds to the harddrive, I wanted to do some time/speed-testing of my own.

rylin:~/Desktop rylin$ time dd if=/dev/urandom of=tst.lol bs=10240 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 85.681237 secs (11951275 bytes/sec)

That's 12 MBps; crazy!
In other words, I guess my HD's fubar.

Check that your drives are in DMA mode and NOT the horrible PIO mode. Sometimes mine changed to PIO for no reason, and the system litterally ground to a halt, it took like 10 mins to boot, but when i changed BACK to DMA, it was fin 30 sec boots again! Crazy!!!

 

[Digidesign]

Any updates?

I just got my Mac Pro today and the 250gb drive included is very noisy, even when idle. When in use, it clatters back and forth really loud. I have a 300gb seagate and 2 other drives in my PC that are nowhere nearly as loud as this mac pro's drive.

I'm in the process of swapping out my PC's SATA drive into my Mac. This is very dissapointing

 

[minimalistic]

Just got a MacPro, hard drive is also very loud, any chance someone could record his hard drive noise so I can compare it to mine?

Perhaps its just me beign paranoid

(its only noisy when working, not when idle)

 

[minimalistic]

Also, just realized that it makes a loud noise when reading, not when writing.

 

[thebeephaha]

Guess ya'll never used Maxtor drives before.......

I'm used to HDD noise, I'm sure its normal, altho the 12mbps is not.

 

[Neonguy]

I replace my built in Apple Hard Drive with a Seagate 320GB 7200.10 and now it super quiet and very fast. Got it from Newegg with shipping for $135.

 

[minimalistic]

So replacing the HD seems to be the only solution...

 

[Neonguy]

Somehow I didn't like the Apple built in Hard Drive so much. I use it for Bootcamp Windows and it transfer slower even after getting rid of the PIO. And when Benchmark the Apple one overall slower then the Seagate.

 

[minimalistic]

How can I get rid of the PIO?

 

[Neonguy]

How can I get rid of the PIO?

There is instruction how to do it on this thread

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/223679/

 

[freezerburrn]

your hard drive isn't louder than the super drive spinning at max is it? Everytime the super drive in my Mac Pro spins to the max, it annoys me greatly.

 

[Digidesign]

The superdrive (Pioneer DVR-111D) is definitely much louder than the HDD when spinning up a disc.

AFAIK, one reason for the loud disc clatter/noise is because the enclosures have no give to them. The drives are screwed onto a metal tray which slides and locks into the metallic case, so any vibrations from the drive resound through the case.

On my PC I had suspension cables for the hard drives, which were elastic bands that kept the drive from touching the case. The same drive in my PC whisper quiet, is much much louder in the Mac Pro once I swapped it in.