"Hard drive clicks" not coming from hard drive at all
Greetings folks. I received a refurbished mini this morning, 2.26 160gb. After setting it up I am noticing a constant clicking noise. I do understand that hard drives aren't silent, but this is a constant sound approx. every 20 seconds. This happens even when the mini is idle.
So, I searched around for some information. One suggestion was disk utility, make sure SMART status is verified (it is). It's a fujitsu 160gb.
Does anyone have a suggestion? Do I need to return the unit?
Thanks
Balwx, I suspect I may have spent about as much time yesterday proving that what could well be the same noise you heard, coming from my computer, didn't come from the hard drive at all!
I posted this on a Mac email listserv yesterday, chronicling my investigations:
Only two weeks after having the hard drive replaced in my mid-2009 MacBook
Pro, I've become aware of a metallic click coming from the computer every 20
seconds (exactly), but only after the screen times out and blanks.
My first guess was that it was the actuator for the hard drive's read/write
positioner. There are many threads on Apple's discussion forums and
elsewhere discussing this noise, each of the ones I read concluding that the
clicking noise was conclusive evidence that the hard drive was dying.
However, none of these assertions seemed to come from disk-drive engineers,
so I considered the possibility that it was a synthesized sound produced by
something in software. I set the sound output level to zero, and the noise
seemed not to return after the screen blanked. To confirm this, I ramped up
the sound output level to maximum and convinced myself that the sound was
LOUDER once it appeared. However, this notion seemed less likely after I
plugged in USB earphones, set sound output to route to them, but found that
the sound still came from the "precisely milled al-u-MIN-i-um billet" (or
however it is that Jonathan Ives so seductively describes it) rather than
from the headphones.
Paying a bit more attention to the sequence of events, I discovered that the
noise occurs just once when the screen blanks, then not again for many more
minutes, but once it starts again, it repeats precisely every 20 seconds. I
thought perhaps that's why it seemed I'd managed to extinguish it by
reducing sound output to zero - I might have missed the initial metallic
"ping," then didn't wait long enough for it to start repeating.
HOWEVER, I've gone through the steps with the sound ramped up again, and now
I'm quite certain that it IS coming from the speakers (both speakers,
equally loudly, confirmed by listening with a stethoscope, AND confirmed by
routing the sound to one or the other speaker by adjusting the stereo
balance). Moreover, if I use Apple mini-plug headphones plugged into the
headphone jack, the sound DOES come out through the headphones. So now an
additional question is why, if it's a synthesized noise generated by
software, it doesn't come out through USB headphones when other sounds do.
I tried one more thing - a safe boot, to eliminate optional login items that
might generate a noise. I discovered that in Safe Mode the computer doesn't
MAKE synthesized sounds. I didn't hear anything when the screen blanked, and I waited many minutes thereafter for the sound to repeat rhythmically, so this also favors it being a synthesized noise, but provides no clues as to
what's causing it.
Last bit of snooping: I logged in as my guest user, pulled up System Prefs to set screen blanking time to the minimum, which required me to enter my admin credentials because I was in the guest account. Doing this, I discovered that
the sound is exactly the same one the computer emits when an admin user clicks the padlock icon in System Prefs to prevent subsequent changes!!!
So:
- It's not mechanical (the drive's OK)
- It's somehow associated with my user account.
- I might be able to get rid of it by a system software reinstall
(Oh, and apologies for the weird line wrapping - an unfortunate interaction between Entourage, mail servers, and a listserv that accepts only ASCII).
