MBP hard drive rattling

Ethan Willoner wrote:
so i just started to notice that my hard drive is making an unusual sound. it gives off an interesting rattling noise, sounding as if there is a small rock bouncing around inside the drive, which of course, there isnt.(i hope). it is very rapid, as if there is something the disk is perhaps coming in contact with as it spins. it doesnt always make this noise, but it is not a drive usage thing. i have managed to reproduce it a number of time, sometimes with high disk usage, sometimes not, sometimes with high cpu/RAM/ a fresh reboot with nothing running, very inconsistent, but still a worrying noise, as i have never heard it before and i have had it for well over a year now. it is a hitachi drive from a mid 2009 MBP. it has already been replaced once when i took it in for a new optical drive, they ran diagnostics and said the HD was fried as well. could this just be the hitachi line of hard drives? i assume its not supposed to make this noise. is there anything i can do at home before taking it in under applecare? the drive is about 8 months old give or take a few weeks.

thanks so much. i did use the almighty GOOGLE but couldnt find anything quite like it, so i thought i would ask.

Noisy drives are usually an indication of something bad. But are you sure there isn't something loose inside your MBP? I guess you could tell that if you shook your MBP.

I'd say back up your drive now with Time Machine or something similar, and be ready for disaster.

Download and run the free demo version of SMART Utility, which will run a suite of tests on your drive's hardware and report its condition more accurately than Disk Utility or Apple Hardware Test.

If SMART Utility gives your drive a clean bill of health, then the noise was probably coming from one of your MBP's fans, rather than from the drive.

All the symptoms indicate to sms ( sudden motion sensor ) . It is responsible for saving your data when turning off the hard disk when g forces above threshold are experienced. If the sounds you hear are present only when the lappy is in some sort of a motion then it is the sms .If not then it can either be the sms malfunctioning or the hard drive having bad sectors .

A S.M.A.R.T. utility might return positive results while you still have bad sectors because it has a threshold of re allocated sector count before it gives you a negative result on that .. .

You can disable the sudden motion sensor and check like that to see if the noise continues .
In order to do that you need to google disable sudden motion sensor and type the code in terminal
If the sound goes away when you stop the sms and your laptop was stationary the whole time then there might be a problem with your sms which might need apple servicing

If the sound persists it's likely that your hard disk is about to go bad and you need to take precautions .I would recommend first making a surface scan to make sure you mark all bad sectors if any to stop the hard drive from trying to access them . after moving your data to another drive might be a smart way forward .

Try running SMART Utility again. Also, here is a link to some failing hard drive sounds:

http://datacent.com/harddrivesounds.php

See if anything sounds familiar.

Good luck!

with your reply I must say do backup your data now ..
you hard disk might be getting ready to throw the towel

well . .if you understand a hard drive's insides you might treat them more gently..
there is a metal disc which spins more than 5000 times a minute there with a surface covered with bazillion magnetic particles so sensitive that they can be manipulated magnetically thus resulting in data ..

And two heads that fly micrometers away from that surface reading and writing constantly ..Vibrations can and very frequently cause those heads to come in contact with the surface physically damaging the disk ..creating a bad sector .. the drive works by an intelligent map where each sector is recorded and the heads move accordingly and when the OS tells the drive to go and read from a bad sector the head gets confused since there is no data there no 0 no 1 that is unacceptable for an electric driven brainless machine ..

this is what you are experiencing .. so in short you need to treat your machine with a feather pillow when it's in use ..

OR go and get yourself an SSD like I did and you can toss it around like there is no tomorrow 🙂

well . .hard disks sometimes just fail as well . .just like that ..
you asked what might be doing this to your hard disks and well .. that's my theory ..