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Level 1

8 points

WD Scorpio Blue still spinning

Hi everyone,

I've been reading this forum through for almost two days, tried everything but nothing helps. Here is my problem:

I've bought WD Scorpio Blue 640GB a replaced with it my previous Hitachi factory HDD. The Hitachi HDD was perfectly calm, I didn`t even know that it spins. The WD HDD spins all the time at full speed. It never slows and thats really annoying. There are several topic where people have the same problem, but there is no solution working for me.

I`ve tried to:

verify disk permissions and repair them,
use HDAPM with Lingon (http://mymacfixes.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-i-stop-clicking-noise-from-hard.ht ml),
disable the Sudden Motion Sensor (pmset -a sms 0),
uncheck "Put the HDD to sleep when possible,

maybe even something more I cant remeber now, but the HDD is still spinning. My problem isnt clickinkg or any other head parking issue. It just still spinns.

If anyone of you can provide me with a solution (link etc.), I will be gratefull. I have one 3,5 WD external drive which is not doing this sound so I hope WD is not producing just 2,5'' HDDs with this sound. Its not usual (compared to my other 3 notebooks I have/used to have).

Just to make sure, I have a clean install of Lion. In Activity Monitor there is no CPU or disk activity, but it still keeps spinning...

Thanks for any help!

Charlie

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), MBP 15'', Late 2008, 2,4 GHz

Posted on Feb 25, 2012 5:38 AM

19 replies

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,305 points

Mar 2, 2012 8:08 AM in response to Charlie.F

I have a Seagate 500 Gb 7200 rpm HDD that works just fine with no noticeable noise, nor SMS built in.

Ciao.

Charlie.F Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 2, 2012 8:27 AM in response to OGELTHORPE

Thanks for tips guys, probably I will try Hitachi as the drive that already was in mac Mac.

Mar 2, 2012 8:59 AM in response to Csound1

Thanks for all your help and the tips guys, It looks like I will be removing this drive too and reverting back to the original. I have been looking at the reviews for the Seagate MomentusXT and I came across this review:

http://http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/storage/disk-drives -hdd-ssd-/seagate-momentus-xt-500gb-710193/review?artc_pg=2

It states:

"Seagate calls its controller 'Adaptive Memory' because like Windows Superfetch technology it learns which files you access most often and moves them into the solid state area to speed up common tasks.

This does mean that the magnetic platters are going to be in use most of the time, so you lose out on two of the major advantages of solid state drives: low power consumption and silence. The Momentous XT is no different to a normal laptop drive in either of these two metrics."

I am not sure if I am asking a bit much here (and please correct me) but can I take it that if you are simply using the mac for say just for a bit of web surfing, do the hard drive platters need to be constantly spinning?

If you place your hand to the right of the touch pad do any of you feel the viabrations of the HDD spinning constantly? if so do the vibrations sometimes stop or are they constant? As I mentioned earlier one of my biggest concerns was not the noise but the negative effect on the battery life due to the constantly spinning platters.

Thanks in advance.

Mar 4, 2012 3:01 AM in response to Charlie.F

All Sorted..!!!!!!

The disk has finally stopped constantly spinning!!!!!

I was reading this post:

http://https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2428581?threadID=2428581

Whch took me to this very long and quite old thread about "the standby problem":

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2416586&tstart=15http://

I mentioned several times earlier that the battery life has been rubbish recently, I have also noticed when I have left my mac on at times thinking standby would automatically "kick in" only to return to it a few hours later with an almost flat battery, the screen would be blank but there was obviosly disk activity.

It is evident now that the problem must have been software related and something was constantly accessing the drive and preventing it from spinning down or going into standby, I could also see see this frantic activity in Console, although I have repaired disk permissions before quite recently I did it again and also verified the disk, infact I did this routine a couple of times and for some reason the problem has now gone, the battery life is excellent again and I now I can barely feel the drive spinning, at times I can not fell any spinning vibrations from it at alI..!!!

There are also a lot of other suggestions throuout the standby problem thread for others to try.

WD Scorpio Blue still spinning