Upgraded to WD2500BEVS Hard drive, makes clicking noise..

What does HDrive Awake do differently than disabling the option to "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver preferences?

Disabling "put hard drive to sleep" doesn't seem to work for my external firewire drive. It goes to sleep after about 10 minutes.

Well, I thought it was working. Seems that rebooting means it doesn't work anymore. Is there a way to check if my APM is set correctly? Also, I don't have a usr/local/bin folder. I have a usr/local/sbin folder, though...

I feel like the installation instructions are missing something? Or I'm useless. 😀

e.g. you have to run ./hdapm, not just "hdapm," when running it from terminal, and I don't have a usr/local/bin folder.

I can run the script from Terminal and it works until reboot, but for whatever reason I can not make it work automatically at boot.

Can someone please help? Pretty please. Thanks!

Well, you need to know how to use terminal before you can make this work.

eg. you need to create the usr/local/bin folder with

sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin/

and move the compiled binary with desired apm level (default 255) to that folder (maybe with "sudo" also). Then, if you want it to run every time you boot, you need to move the .plist file also to folder /Library/LaunchDaemons .

You can also put the compiled binary where ever you like, but in that case you need to modify the .plist to point to that location.

The autostarting .plist doesn't work, if the clicking drive isn't disk0 and you haven't modified that .plist to fit your needs.

I hope that I explained it so you could understand it. You can also view the readme file that comes with hdapm, but it seems that it is in Pages -format, which is kind of annoying, because it's not a free program. If you want to read it, you can do it (with poor resolution though) with Preview.

Sorry, it seems like that the read me that comes with the other download (not the source) is readable with Textedit.

Here is a quick install for the image, that doesn't contain the source:

1. Mount the image

2. Open and paste to Terminal (CAUTION: Use with your own responsibility! But I think it should work.):

sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin && sudo cp /Volumes/hdapm/hdapm /usr/local/bin/ && sudo cp /Volumes/hdapm/hdapm.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/ && sudo /Volumes/hdapm/hdapm disk0 max;

You should know what you are doing before running that.

Message was edited by: Laiskumus

Thank you for that information. It seems that by checking the system.log, this is the issue:


Dec 14 11:11:43 localhost com.apple.launchctl.System[2]: launchctl: Dubious ownership on file (skipping): /Library/LaunchDaemons/hdapm.plist

---

Apparently my MBP is dubious of the file. Anyway to reduce the...uh... dube?

Laiskumus, you're a genius! Your script worked perfectly. I checked my system log this time and indeed, it worked!

-------

Dec 14 18:26:19 localhost hdapm[38]: disk0: Hitachi HTS722020K9SA00
Dec 14 18:26:19 localhost hdapm[38]: Setting APM level to 0xfe:
Dec 14 18:26:19 localhost hdapm[38]: Success

Any idea why the system was dubious before I ran your line?

Thanks again!

I think that the file must be moved there as root...

Glad to hear it works 🙂

Yes I'm glad too, though I'm quite unhappy with Apple for letting this bug through. I have the same problem with external 200GB 7200rpm Hitachi 2.5 drive. Since the APM fix only affects internal drives, whenever I connect this external one, it clunks every few seconds when idle, so I don't leave it plugged in very long because of this. NO issues on my XP Bootcamp partition. When is Apple going to fix this I wonder?

I've got Declunk to work as intended. However, it did not solve the issue of the disturbing noise.
I even bought a new harddisk from Samsung after I thought my original one (Fujitsu 60GB) had an error. But the noise seems to be unrelated to the harddisk itself.

So all my hope was with hdapm. Lol. This is what I got:

./hdapm disk0 max
disk0: SAMSUNG HM160HI
Setting APM level to 0xfe: FAILED: APM not supported

A few posts above someone mentioned that 4 seconds might be the key. Declunk works with 5 seconds. I didn't have an interest in using someone else's code, installation routine & whatever. Nor was I interested in installing Xcode to re-compile it on my Intel Mac for a 4 seconds cycle.

So I've written a short one-liner using simple shell syntax, which I placed into /etc/rc.common just above the host configuration part at the end of the start script.

while `sleep 4`; do echo *clunk* > /tmp/declunk && rm -f /tmp/declunk; done &

This solved my issue with the declunking noise.

Anyone else like to comment on the HDapm tool not working on battery?