Upgraded to WD2500BEVS Hard drive, makes clicking noise..

I have the high load/unload cycles as well on my 7200 rpm Seagate Momentus 160GB 7200.2 that came with my MBP. After 1 month I am at close to 30.000 cycles.

I installed HDDlife on XP, moved the slider from the APM setting to the most right side and the clunking is gone. Rebooted to OSX, and its still gone. Rebooted to XP, uninstalled HDDlife, rebooted to OSX, still gone.

Seems to have fixed it for me. I still have to try and shutdown my MBP completely and see if the noise comes back.

Dragonguard, when you shutdown the laptop, the hard drive APM setting is reset to factory defaults 😟

I'm researching on a new APM tuner, It's just I've got so little time...

You would be a real Hero though, if you get it to work.... 😉

How do you check your load/unload cycles?

I'm in the same position.. I upgraded the 120GB in my MacBook Pro to the 250GB WD drive (removed from the Passport USB enclosure).

The first thing I noticed after rebooting with the new drive is how much louder it is than the original Fujitsu drive. Both the "crunching" of normal drive access, and the "clunk" of it apparently seating the heads.

Aside from the drive wear issues others have brought up, the noise is annoying enough to me to be a problem in itself. So much so, that I'll probably replace it with a 200GB+ Fujitsu drive if I can't solve it.


A bunch of searches turned up a program called "APM Utility X", which can set the drive parameters. It had been abandoned by its author long ago, but I was able to find a download link. Unfortunately, it didn't run.. it just crashed at startup with no output or errors in the log files.


It didn't include source code, so I can't recompile it for Leopard/Intel.

There is also this hint for setting Acoustic Management levels, which may help: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041014005324939

Im almost certain its the EFI. I have a Macbook that was clunk free until the most recent firmware update and now it clunks constantly. I have now had the hard drive replaced by Apple TWICE and they are unwilling to even consider something else is wrong besides the hard drive.

Its all in the firmware, and it hits the most unlucky of us. Apple has no solution, and will have no solution.

Would this issue cause an external hard drive to clunk as well?

I booted my MacBook Pro into Linux (Knoppix LiveCD) to see what information was available there, and to see if tools like 'hdparm' could effect the behavior.

Using hdparm to set the AAM Acoustic setting failed:
/dev/sda:
setting acoustic management to 200
HDIO GETACOUSTIC failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

Setting the APM value appeared to work:
hdparm -B 200 /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xC8 (200)

But, it didn't appear to effect the clunking noise after I booted back into Mac OS.
I should have set it to a higher value for testing.. I'll do that if I reboot into Linux again.

Here is the output from "hdparm -I", with lots of interesting information:

/dev/sda:

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD2500BEVS-22UST0
Serial Number: WD-WXC805150691
Firmware Revision: 01.01A01
Standards:
Supported: 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 488397168
device size with M = 1024*1024: 238475 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 250059 MBytes (250 GB)
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Queue depth: 32
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 0
Advanced power management level: unknown setting (0x0080)
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 128
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* NOP cmd
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* Advanced Power Management feature set
* SET_MAX security extension
* Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
* 48-bit Address feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* FLUSH CACHEEXT
* SMART error logging
* SMART self-test
* General Purpose Logging feature set
* WRITE {DMA|MULTIPLE}_FUAEXT
* 64-bit World wide name
* IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
* Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* SATA-I signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
* Host-initiated interface power management
* Phy event counters
DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization
Device-initiated interface power management
* Software settings preservation
* SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
* SCT Long Sector Access (AC1)
* SCT LBA Segment Access (AC2)
* SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
* SCT Features Control (AC4)
* SCT Data Tables (AC5)
unknown 206[12]
unknown 206[13]
Security:
Master password revision code = 65534
supported
not enabled
not locked
frozen
not expired: security count
not supported: enhanced erase
88min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT.
Checksum: correct

No, it seems like this particular HDD parameter (perhaps all of them?) is not retained by the drive, and must be set explicitely by the OS at startup. OS X seems to have no way of doing this.

Is that any drive in general, or are you seeing something in the drive info that tells you this? I have seen other people reporting setting APM parameters in Windows, which are only lost on a cold boot.

Those settings shown above were captured in Linux before using hdparm to adjust things.

Under Linux following command helped to disable the clunk noise at least if you stay in linux: smartctl -o on /dev/hda followed by smartctl -t offline /dev/hda (sda respectively). Unfortunately after any reboot those setting get lost and smartctl for Mac via Fink doesn't permit the -o parameter...

Thanks guys, the clicking is now gone for a while, thanks to declunker.

Though I'm still looking for a better solution than writing a few bits to disk every 4 seconds...

Message was edited by: Laiskumus

Hey everyone. I'm having the same problem with the heads always parking themselves (for me every 5-10 seconds). I used to have a 60GB Toshiba drive in my MacBook (which had no clunking problems at all) but then I recently upgraded to a 120GB Seagate (model ST9120821AS, revision 3.06; also, it was refurbished). When I upgraded the drive I still had Tiger and I never had the clunking noise (I know that for sure cause I have pretty good hearing and I usually use my laptop in a quiet room). Then I upgraded to Leopard and still no clunking, at least not right away. Then a few weeks ago it all started. At first I thought it was just writing data, but then I realized that it was the sound of parking heads. The only thing I can think of that may have coincided with when the problem started is when I updated OSX to 10.5.1. I can't be sure of that, but the two things seem to have happened at around the same time and I can't think of any other significant change I've made to my computer since then (I'm pretty sure there haven't been any firmware updates). So something that I'm wondering is if I can downgrade back to OSX 10.5.0 to see if it was the update that caused this. Anyone know if this is possible?

I have XP Pro installed with Bootcamp, although I still haven't tested in XP to see if the parking happens there. Also, when I hold down the Option key at startup to choose whether to boot into XP or OSX and just leave it there at that screen for a few minutes, there is absolutely no parking noises even though the drive is running. So, I am almost sure it is not a hardware problem (despite it being a refurbed drive).

Also, I installed declunk and it works great to get rid of the parking problem (although the 24KB writes that it does every 5 seconds are kinda annoying too, but I won't complain about that cause that's much better than having the constant parkings!!)

I remember I had the clunk problem in 10.5.0 too...
Declunk with two instances running at 1 sec have at least stopped the Load CycleCount counter but not the sound completely. Now I have three instances running. I hope this bug will be fixed soon! :/

wow... 3 instances at 1s!! I only need one at 4 seconds.

One more thing: before upgrading to Leopard I cloned my system to an external HD. So last night I booted up with that clone (which is 10.4.10) and the parking heads problem was still happened... on both the external and internal drives! I find that really odd because I didn't have the problem before upgrading to Leopard.