Hard Drive Static Noise

Has it been confirmed this is ONLY Seagate drives? I have the WD in mine and I have some kind of odd noise that sounds more like plastic creaking than anything, but it is only there when the machine is on or in sleep mode.

I have the same problem on my 20" intel iMac and I don't have a barracuda HD, I think it's Western Digital but this is what it says: WDC WD2500JS-40NGB2

The sounds only come up when I'm starting up an application, is this normal? Please some answers would be nice!

bump

Finally information on this noise! It was driving me crazy as well, thought something was wrong, decided to live with the static, but now I have a twist. I have Comcast wireless internet, 2.4 phone was a problem (kept kicking me off the internet when I used my pc laptop) bought a 5.8 digital phone and now I have a lot of static on the phone - which is worse when I am on the computer. I tried a filter for the phone but it didn't work. Are there different filters? Is anyone else having this problem. Everywhere I turn for help I get the same answer, "it's not us, try..." This from Comcast, the phone company and Uniden.
Lynda

I had the same problem with 20in intel after only a week , they said it was the fan returned to apple store and they wanted to repair it but i said i wanted a new one which they did and its fine very quiet. thanks apple

Hans-Joachim, thankyou!

Your information regarding the Seagate drive was very important in helping me replace my drive for a much quieter Western Digital. I'll tell you the whole story ...

I got my local apple repair guy to order a new drive. Unfortunately he could not choose which make of drive would be sent out to him - it could be another Seagate, a Maxtor or a Western Digital. After hearing this I decided to ask him to go ahead and order the drive and in the meantime I decided to take the iMac up to the London Regent Street store. On arrival at the store it was indeed difficult to hear the problematic static noise. However the guy (to my surprise) did say he could hear the problem (so there was no need for me to demand to be taken to a studio for a proper listen ;p). I made the front-line Genius Bar technician go get his manager for a proper chat about the whole issue (like another member on this thread - David Feliciano - I too printed the thread out and waved the issue in front of everyones' nose). The manager assured me that most of the drives make this noise. I argued that I could not hear anything on the Maxtor drives (which were installed on all the iMac's on display downstairs in the Store). He said perhaps they were quieter, however he would not personally want a Maxtor in his Mac. I agreed with him on this, I have always heard good things about Seagate (from a music recording perspective), until now. He said the Seagate and the Western Digital were the more reliable drives.

It would have taken the Apple Store a full 7 days to get the new drive in and install it in my machine. Since my on order drive was due in that day (this was Yesterday in fact), I rang to see if my friendly Apple repairman had received it. Yes he had, and it was Western Digital! I told the Apple Store that I would sort the problem out myself, asked them to look after the Mac till the evening, and explored London for the rest of the day!

Today I took the iMac to our friendly repairman and he fitted the drive by the end of the day. I'm typing from it now and there is certainly much less noise than before. You can still hear it, but it is hardly annoying (less than half what it was before I'd say).

To anyone with this problem my advice would be to get someone to order a new drive in for you, and then if it is Western Digital, go ahead and hope that it works for you too. If it is not, keep giving it back to your repairman till you strike lucky!

Best

Dave

iMac Intel 17', 1.83, 1Gb, 160Gb, 128 (Video) Mac OS X (10.4.6) emi 62m, Logic Pro 7.2

Powermac G4, 400MHz, 256, 18Gb

KeithandStef,

Those sounds you are hearing are coming from the speakers. Perfectly normal. You can turn them off if you don't like them. System Prefs/Sound/Sound Effects.

Yep, Western Digital......the sound is normal. What you are hearing is the disk spinning up and accessing your application for you.

You have a Western Digital Drive. Yes, the sound you are hearing is normal. The disk is accessing your application when you hear that noise.

Hi there.. i upgraded my RAM to 1.5GB but i still hear the continuous static noise from my iMac. One weird thing is when i use Boot Camp and then go into Windows, i can't hear the noise.. the noise is not there! I don't know what's wrong, how to explain this and why the noise only appear in OS X... anyone has any idea?

Mac OS X has a different swapping strategy compared to Windows - causing the heads of the hdd to move in a different way.

Do you have background tasks running which need hard disk activities - like streaming music from your computer?

When i upgraded my iMac to 2GByte the constand noise was gone - except occasional bursts which are occuring when the hdd is doing read or write operations.

As stated in an earlier post the noise might be louder if your iMac is equipped with a Seagate Barracuda disk - because these buggers are known to be noisier than other brands.

My advice is: Upgrade your RAM first, if it doesn't help, change the disk manufacturer (and upgrade the capacity;). Anything else than the Seagate Barracuda should do it. But keep in mind: the faster the drive's spindle rpm is - as louder is usually the head positioning mechanism.

Cheers

Hans-Joachim

iMac 17" Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.4) owns also a bunch of PPC Macs

Hi,

I checked with Activity Monitor and i saw that there are some processes that keep accessing my hdd.. After that i found out that they were processes from the developer tools installed on my Mac. Since i don't know how to disable them, i just uninstall all the developer tools and now the noise is gone... Although i do need to figure out how to install the tools without the noise since i have to use those tools. Anyhow, i'm just relieved that the noise is gone.. Thanks for the advice!

Cheers.
Hafiz Muhtar.

Hi Hafiz,

if the noise occured directly after the installation, it might be caused by Spotlight re-indexing the hdd. This operation might take a long time (even some hours), depending on how big your installation was - and how much foreground activity is taking place on your machine (this will interrupt spotlight).

If the activity is caused by some background processes of the developer tools (i have them installed too - and i don't have any background activities), you could use the LauchD editor Lingon to identify and disable the process for testing purposes. You can find Lingon here:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28365

Tschüß und viel Spaß

Hans-Joachim

iMac 17" Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.4) owns also a bunch of PPC Macs

Hi Hans,

In my case it's not because of Spotlight.. i'll try using the program you recommend.. Danke!

Hafiz Muhtar.

I have the very same problem that is the main topic of this thread.
The problem is not to be disregarded as minor, since it originates from a constant access to the HDD unit by some process. IMHO, this is clearly a software problem, so it makes absolutly no sense to go and swap the computer, much less the HDD. Even if you do not hear it anymore, the processes will continue to access the HDD.
I've tried pin-pointing some processes (with the tool suggested above). I seldom use XCode, so I was puzzled to still be having the problem. Surprisingly enough, my noise problems were gone when turning nmbd off. This proccess is part of the SaMBa distribution, which provides for the Windows Sharing feature in OSX.
Does people from Apple read this posts? could you confirm/deny some software bug? I mean: I have a PPC Mini at home and share a HDD through samba with no problems at all. So, is there a bug in the OSX/Intel port of SaMBa?
Cheers,

Marcos