New Mac Convert. A little help please?

[reggansa]

After years of owning a PC and always wanting a Mac I finally bought one. What got me was the Mac mini(I'm returning it tomorrow). OSX is a welcome change. I've done both linux(GNOME and KDE) and windows and I am loving this mac.

The mini(the 1.4Ghz version) was a little too slow for my needs(music/photos). So I saved some money and bought a refurb powermac from the Apple Store. It's the dual 2.7ghz version. I am amazed at the speed in which I received. The site says 7-10 days, but I got it in two---AND they threw in a extra 512MB of ram. If it was an accident, oh well. I won't complain.

Now the only problem I'm having is with the 250GB hard drive it came with. It is quite loud (loud clicking). The drive is a WDC WD2500JD-41HBC0. If I recall, there was a utility(on windows that I know of), to make the drive quiet--sacrificing speed. Does such a utility exists for the Mac?

I bought the older powermac(I have no idea which revision) because I have PCI cards that I wanted to use, and I didn't want to wait for the binaries to be made native for the intel platform. As far as the speed (coming from an intel 3.0Ghz HT) this thing absolutely amazing. All I can say is wow.

Any ideas on the utility?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Avarus]

After years of owning a PC and always wanting a Mac I finally bought one. What got me was the Mac mini(I'm returning it tomorrow). OSX is a welcome change. I've done both linux(GNOME and KDE) and windows and I am loving this mac.

The mini(the 1.4Ghz version) was a little too slow for my needs(music/photos). So I saved some money and bought a refurb powermac from the Apple Store. It's the dual 2.7ghz version. I am amazed at the speed in which I received. The site says 7-10 days, but I got it in two---AND they threw in a extra 512MB of ram. If it was an accident, oh well. I won't complain.

Now the only problem I'm having is with the 250GB hard drive it came with. It is quite loud (loud clicking). The drive is a WDC WD2500JD-41HBC0. If I recall, there was a utility(on windows that I know of), to make the drive quiet--sacrificing speed. Does such a utility exists for the Mac?

I bought the older powermac(I have no idea which revision) because I have PCI cards that I wanted to use, and I didn't want to wait for the binaries to be made native for the intel platform. As far as the speed (coming from an intel 3.0Ghz HT) this thing absolutely amazing. All I can say is wow.

Any ideas on the utility?

Thanks for any help.

Before you do that, i would suggest you run the AHT and boot from the install disk to do a disk repair to make sure their isn't anything wrong with your HDD. Clicking isn't always a normal thing, not trying to scare you or anything but it wouldn't hurt.

 

[reggansa]

Before you do that, i would suggest you run the AHT and boot from the install disk to do a disk repair to make sure their isn't anything wrong with your HDD. Clicking isn't always a normal thing, not trying to scare you or anything but it wouldn't hurt.

I tried that. HDD was fine. I did fix the problem though, the drive is almost silent now. I changed the Acoustic Management setting on the HD.

I booted into openfirmware and ran this command:

0 0 0 here 428000 , ef , 4000 1 apply ata-command hd .

What a difference! Now if I could keep these "jet engine" fans down life would be great. My Mac is quiet, but I invested alot of money in my PC(Zalman CPU coolers, Fanleses power supply, etc.) and it was dead silent. I'm just used to that. I guess you pay a price for power. I still wouldn't go back to the PC though.

Thanks for the help.