Am I the only one with a blip/pop noise?!

Hi all,

This is my first Apple Discussions post. I've been reading Apple Discussions a lot over the past few weeks because I've been wanting to get Logic Studio and get into computer-aided music-making, which also means getting a Mac, an audio interface, a MIDI keyboard controller, etc.

Anyway, I got my refurbished 15.4" MacBook Pro about ten hours ago. It's got the 120GB hard drive. I ran Software Update about five hours ago. About two hours ago, I finally got the chance to sit down and use the computer. That's when I started noticing the blip/pop noise. I also hear it about once every 1-5 minutes. I'm glad I'm not the only person experiencing this annoyance.

Before I ran across this thread, I ran across this one, also discussing the same problem: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89643

I guess I'll call AppleCare tomorrow.

Hi Folks,

The Apple product specalist got back to me, and we sent a few emails back and forth. Below is the dialogue.

Email 1- Applecare guy to me:

Hello Josh, I have received a response from my contact in engineering and they have confirmed that the noise you are experiencing on you macbook pro is normal behavior. It will not effect the integrity of the drive nor the performance. If you have any questions in regards to this feel free to contact me. Regards, XXXname removedXXX AppleCare


Email 2- My reply to him:

Hi XXXname removedXXX,

Thank you for your response. However, I was expecting a bit more insight.

I am sure the noise is normal operation. The noise is also terribly annoying in a quiet room.

Thus, I would like to investigate ways to reduce or eliminate the noise.


Answers to any of the questions below would be tremendously appreciated.

1) What is the noise?

2) How can we reduce or eliminate this noise?

3) Is the 3rd party HDAPM utility (found at mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/) a viable solution in your opinion?

4) What effect do you expect the HDAPM utility to have on operation and longevity of the hard disk drive?

I'm just asking for educated opinions, so I can make an educated decision. I understand if you can't give out this sort of advice for legal/liability reasons, but my sole mission is to get an opinion from an engineer regarding the questions above.

Thanks very much,
Josh


Email 3- His reply:

Hi Josh, Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to provide very much information in regards to the questions you are asking. As the noise is deemed to be normal, I cannot offer any advice on how to change or alter that. In regards to the utility you inquired about. It may result in a decline in the noise you note, but as for any long term effects, that i cannot say yes or no to as its an untested 3rd party utility to which I cannot comment on. I apologize I'm not able to provide much in the way of the specifics that you are requesting but since it is, once again, normal behavior, Apple wont be able to assist in altering that. Regards, XXXname removedXXX AppleCare


Email 4- My response to him:

Hi XXXname removedXXX,

I appreciate your position, and you taking the time to respond to me.

I must give you my opinion that calling this noise a "normal behavior" does not excuse Apple of responsibility for explaining or correcting the issue. The noise is apt to drive anyone who works in a quiet room batty. Many people have been driven to return their computers. Other people, not knowing if the noise was normal or not, have made repeated trips to genius bars or shipped their compuers in for repair. By saying "this is a normal noise", and going no further, Apple is actually making this issue bigger than it needs to be.

Apple should formally comment on this issue and any available solutions to the issue. If it a normal behavior, a brief explanation about what the noise is would be most helpful.

I am fairly certain that Apple's customers have properly diagnosed the issue and generated a few solutions. If we can do it, Apple should be able to do it as well. Explaining the way the 3rd party solutions work should be a simple task, and would help a lot of customers out.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck,

Josh



...and there it is.

Josh,I too, asked the product specialist I was dealing with to find out from the engineers what the hard drive is doing when it is making these pop noises. He hasn't gotten back to me and it has been a week.

Please post the next email you get from Apple I am curious what they will say.

Wow. I guess I am not surprised by the REP's replies but I am floored that APPLE is leaving us all hanging. This is not acceptable and my faith is APPLE has been shaken. Josh, you said and asked all the right stuff. I wonder what happens from here......

I have a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (160 GB 5400 rpm) in my MBP, which I installed myself about a year ago to replace the stock drive.
I am pretty sure that the same noise we are all talking about was not present during the first months of use. I am less sure whether its appearance a few weeks ago coincided with a system update (namely 10.4.9 to 10.4.11) or not.

For those of you still unsure, this noise (that I would describe more like a "pfuiit") is definitely related to the drive parking its heads.
If you have not already done so, you should absolutely read this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1001366

especially the posts by Whiskey in the Jar-o and emarmite2.

As they suggested, I have installed smartmontools, which gives you, among other information, the number of load/unload cycles your drive has been through. By running the command before and just after the noise occurs, I could confirm that one occurrence of the noise made the count increase by 1. After a few minutes, the cycle count increased by dozens. My drive is already at 364,000 cycles after only one year of use, and Hitachi gives a reliability value of 600,000...

This is a bit scaring, if one should extrapolate from these figures that my drive will be prone to fail when it will be 2-years old, as all other drives exhibiting the same behavior may see their lifetime greatly reduced.

I cannot understand how Apple can qualify this "normal behavior"??
Have you questioned the support of the drive manufacturers? (I plan to do it.)

From other discussion threads, it seems that the problem occurs with Mac OS X but not when the same computer runs Windows (I have not tested this yet). If this turned out to be true, then it would entirely be Apple's responsibility to fix their drivers or whatsoever.

I have not tried the hdapm solution yet, but I think one interesting question is, if this is supposed to work: which is the best setting to use (from 1 to 254), because we obviously still want the heads to park when it is really required (does the "max" setting may impede them?).

For what it's worth, I updated to 10.5.2 today, via combo, and the popping noise from the hard drive that'd been there since I got the MBP a month ago is gone.

I have the same click or clunk noise that everyone else is hearing! In fact, I even started a couple topics on it! I took it to the genius bar once they found nothing wrong with it. I called them recently again to complain about it, the tech said basically there is nothing they can do. I would love a hardware update. I have checked with some friends who have the same computer as well. All of theirs do it too! I have the 160 gig HD in mine they have the 120 but that doesn't make a difference because the sound is in both! It is so annoying especially when studying in a quiet room! Apple please address this issue!

APPLE PLEASE RELEASE AN UPDATE FOR THIS!

I used the hdapm tool to get rid of the noise and it worked.... then yesterday I updated my software to 10.5.2 and the noise is back! Dammit!!!! Now I have to go back an redo the hdapm install. This is really annoying.

hey guys they saing that will release a new mbp!
with peryn processor and mutli touch! and i will be ****** off if the new mbp comes without the weird noise!
u guys think they will release a new update to take this noise off or in the new mbp?
i can trade my new brand mbp wich i bought in december/2007 in the new one?
tks guys!

Blip! There it goes again.

Wanted all to know it's Feb 28th and the new MBP's came out two days ago.

I bought mine yesterday only to be surprised by this blip/pop noise emanating from under the left side of the keyboard.

It's a 2.4 GHz Intel with a Fujitsu 200 GB hard-drive.

The video (in the above thread) shows the same problem I'm having, I copy/pasted the link again here:

http://web.mac.com/ethwrite/iWeb/Digital%20Witch/MBP%20PONG%20%20NOISE.html

Have owned several Apple laptops over time and still use two of them, 17 & 15" Powerbooks purchased in the past one & two years respectively.

Have read the exhaustive and thorough posts and am grateful to confirm I'm not 'overly-sensitive' or just going batty. And I'm certainly not ready to start downloading 3rd party software to fix a brand new machine. (And frankly, the installation of it sounded really perplexing to me, maybe it just reads that way)

I didn't recall reading about MBP's NOT having this problem so that's my quest:

I'll go into the store and print out some of these threads so that when an employee inquires why I'm 'listening' to the MBP's I can just hand them the printout instead of confirming my questionable behavior with an explanation.

Will report back.

In the mean time I would like to ask the question again:

Does anyone know of the problem NOT existing on new MBP's that have NOT installed the workaround?

This is not an acceptable issue for me and I have no problem getting my 2K back and waiting it out till a proper fix or new gen comes around.

Many thanks,

Ted

someone know if the hdamp works?
cuz here in my mac doesnt worked!
what can i do to this software work?
someone solved this problem yet?
tks

hey man do u found some solution for this issue?
i cant take this anyome hahaa
i think hdamp doesnt work im my mac
tks

anyone having luck with the suggested hdamp download? I tried to use it but was not able to figure it out. I just got this mbp on Saturday and I'm having this "plink" noise issue too. I don't know if I can get used to it! Are people returning their computers, changing the hard drive (mine is Fujitsu) or hoping for a mac driver update?

Hdamp still works for me (did the procedure like 1 month ago). Would like to hear something about the possible harm it could do, though....

Message was edited by: Spinoza2012

Message was edited by: Spinoza2012