Hard drive spinning out of control.

Your hard drive spins at the same speed all the time. What has probably speeded up is your computer's fans, and if true, that indicates that something is working the processors harder than you're used to and heating things up more than usual. That not only makes the processors hungrier for energy than usual, but the fans themselves draw more than usual too.

Read this article about using Activity Monitor to determine what's causing things to heat up and drain your battery faster:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473

Assuming the indicated 5:45 remaining is an accurate estimate (always a big assumption, since it's only an estimate, based exclusively on what the computer is doing at a given moment), that's 82% of the seven-hour advertised maximum time you can ever hope to get out of your battery in the lightest possible use. Most people never get close to seven hours in their everyday usage of their computers. In other words, if you can actually get 5:45, that's good. So the real issue apparently is the noise and vibration.

There have been a number of complaints posted in these forums about excessive hard drive noise and vibration in 2011 MBPs, and I have wondered whether there is something about the way hard drives are mounted in those machines that is slightly different from previous unibody models and causes more vibration to be transmitted to the case (which acts as a sounding board and amplifies it). One poster mentioned having put a small piece of some sort of thin plstic foam between his hard drive and the computer's case that quieted things down considerably, but he wasn't specific about exactly where he'd put it.

I don't think it's possible for your drive to be spinning faster than it did at first, so I really suspect the difference is either a change in how much it vibrates with each revolution or in how much of the vibration is being transmitted to you. The former would suggest a problem with the drive itself, and the latter with the way it's mounted and secured.

Message was edited by: eww

Stupid suggestion alert....you don't perhaps have a DVD or CD in the drive. Certainly increases vibration and noise.

Perhaps five and a half hours is reasonable, but not two days ago under the same circumstances it was an estimate of nearly eight hours, why is that? This is my problem and one that I don't think you are quite addressing.

If you ever got an eight-hour estimate, it was wrong. Even Apple doesn't suggest that it's possible to run your computer that long on a charge if it's doing anything.

Actually, the huge range of variability in the time-remaining estimate is exactly what I was addressing in part of my previous post, though not in detail. Because the estimate is based on the machine's instantaneous power usage from one moment to the next, changes in what the machine is doing can cause the estimate to change drastically from one moment to the next. And "what the computer is doing" includes such activities as backlighting the display and keyboard — which are (by default, I think) set to regulate themselves according to the ambient light level in your workspace. That means that with no applications or widgets open and no significant background processes (Time Machine backup, Spotlight indexing, etc.) using processor cycles, there can still be very significant differences in energy consumption by the machine, which are reflected in the time-remaining estimate. Apple says the display backlight level alone can make a difference of *three hours* in battery run time.

No solution, but fyi. I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and wanted another. I just got a 13" i7 and noticed the same issues of sound (not noise) and battery life... thought it was Spotlight indexing or running my second monitor (I noticed that actually heated it up pretty much and the fans will come on at times). I've watched activity monitor and found nothing out of the ordinary. My conclusion is that the hard drive sound is just "different" than my older MBP and the battery life is within the normal range. I've heard much louder and seen much greater energy consumption. I'll continue to monitor discussions to see if I'm missing something, but I'm thinking mine is "normal." Sound and battery life seem to be pretty subjective.

Right palm-rest? 2011 MBPs have the hard drive in the top left hand corner near the screen, not the bottom right hand corner like the pre-unibodies?

#1-Eject the CD or DVD from the optical drive...LOL!

#2-Dont forget to laugh, as we've all done it, or something boneheaded like it.

#3- Enjoy your new machine and remember this incident 😉

HTH

2011 MBPs have the hard drive in the top left hand corner near the screen, not the bottom right hand corner like the pre-unibodies?

No, they sure don't. In the 13s and 15s, it's front right. In the 17s, front left.

After checking my own videos - you're right 🙂

I also have this problem. I'm using a less than year old iMac and it has recently started having high and constant hard drive activity. It slows my performance down to barley tolerable.

I was once a Mac technician and can say with certainty it is the drive, it sounds just like a defragmentation is taking place, and it stops the second you put it to sleep. I've run different tools on it and find nothing except some JavaVM permissions that don't seem to get corrected and other apple support threads seem to say that can be ignored. I've also checked for malware, etc. The only thing that seemed to work for a couple days was when I had made a Carbon Copy Clone to an external, erased the iMac drive and cloned back. The machine seemed to be back to normal for a day or two (at most), then the drive activity started back up and hasn't stopped. That cloning also ruled out a serious level of fragmentation causing it. I've also not added any hardware or software (other than Apple updates).

I have strong suspicions that it is 10.6.7. I can't recall how close this problem started to the last software update, but since 10.6.7 is very recent update and I have it installed it has become number one suspect by elimination. If I don't find a solution shortly I'll reinstall the OS and not upgrade to 10.6.7. Hopefully I won't come to that.

After reading this thread and posting a comment I went back to my machine and decided to use Single User Mode and run fsck from there. After running it twice and it not reporting any problems (which I don't think necessarily means it didn't repair something) I rebooted and held shift down to boot into Safe Mode and force run permissions repair. After rebooting again to get out of Safe Mode I have found that the spinning drive has ceased. Seems like an awful simple solution to a problem that brought my machine to nearly a halt, but it appears to have cleared things up.

Hopefully this helps you also. If it starts spinning again I'll try to follow up on this thread.

P.S. for awhile I started thinking it might be related to running VMware's Fusion (running Windows 7), but hopefully that though was wrong.