MacBook Pro mid 2012 hard disk click

Are you moving it around when this happens? All MBPs have a motion sensor in them that makes the HDD dock the heads when the notebook moves. More then likely that is what you are hearing. Stop moving it around and if and when you do need to move it from place to place close the lid which will put it into sleep mode. ,And if you are usinig it opn your lap/knees stop moving it in a quick motion. Put it on something more stable.

Then I'd say it isn't the hard drive or Apple really didn't replace it.

When you got it back were all your programs and files still on it? If they were Apple did not replace the hard drive.

Simple way around this. Apple has a 14 day No Questions Asked return policy. Us it and return that system and buy another. As it is now that is not a new system, IMHO. Any system a few days old that has something replaced is no longer new. It is used and refurbished. You did not buy or want a Used or Refurbished system. Go return it and get another NEW system.

No arguement needed. Just take it in with all the packaging and say "I want to return this". they will say OK or at the most ask why. If they ask why say "because I would like to return this". End of story.

I have exactly the same problem wih my MBP 13" mid 2012 and 500Go HDD bought on 15th June.

The problem was not present at the beginning.

Maybe it is due to one of the recent update.

Waiting for ML to see if problem disappears.

One more point : my HDD is not a Toshiba but Hitachi : HTS547550A9E384.

So I am not sure that this noise is related to the disk itself.

I have used the laptop with SMS desactivated (sudo pmset -a sms 0) and the click is still there...

I have the exact same problem. I bought mine on Aug 25th 2012. The noise come after I wake the mac book up from sleep

Even though chances are small, but it is not impossible to get a second faulty drive. Or a third for that matter, just really really unlucky.

It doesn't however look like an issue with all mid-2012 MBPs since I haven't personally seen too many complaints on this issue. Though some less technically aware users might ocnsider it "normal sound".

Upgrading Hard Drive and RAM (if they are user-replacable) are authorized operations that will not void the warranty unless you break something during the upgrade work.

On a related note, when I replaced the drive on my MBP, it suddenly started doing the clicking, right after boot up. It seemed like it only clicked if the drive was not active for a few seconds. This of course should be a longer period of time, e.g. 10 minutes, to click and put the drive in sleep mode. It starts spinning again if required. Extra clicking however can and will kill the drive eventually since it's designed and built for a certain number of those clicks.

The source of the problem was that Apple modfies the firmware of the HDs they include to be compatible with their custom instructions. The drive that I purchased, along with many others are incompatible and that causes the excessive clicking.

The solution was a tool called "hdapm" which some guy wrote (you can Google it) and fixed the problem for me. No more extra clicking at the cost of more battery usage of course since the drive doesn't stop spinnng with hdapm script run at boot time. The tool hasn't been updated since so now on ML, I have to run it manually on reboot using sudo.

Point is, this might be one of those cases were a batch of not faulty, but just incompatible (unmodified) drives went into production.

Either way return and replace is my recommendation too.

Hi. I'm the developer of hdapm. Lots of third party HDDs suffer from this clicking issue. It doesn't mean your HDD is faulty, but it can be rather annoying. Usually it is third party HDDs that do this, however, so it's surprising if an Apple OEM HDD is doing it.

I recently released a new version of hdapm which works better on systems that have multiple HDDs, and also includes an uninstaller in the package. It's been tested with Mountain Lion and you should not need to run it manually on every boot with this new version.

You can get it at:

http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm

All Apple OEM hard drives are 3rd party. Apple does not make HDD, they buy them from a manufacturer.

I mean to say: Apple OEM HDDs traditionally have modified settings/firmware and in my experience do not suffer from the 'clicking' issue[*]. It usually occurs in standard, aftermarket HDDs.

[*] Caused by repeatitive load/unload cycle as the drive enters and exits its low-power state.

Sorry to disagree with you again but Apple does not load any special firmware on the spinning HDDs they use in any of their computers. They are just standard drives made by any manufacturer, the same as you can buy for multiple vendors. In fact the original drive that came in my MBP is now inside a Windows XP desktop system as the third drive in that system. Working just fine in a home built Win computer running XP. Just need to be formatted NTFS and the partition table changed from GUID to MBR.

Take the HDD out and have a look at the label. Every Apple-shipped HDD I've ever seen (and that's quite a lot) has an Apple logo on the label. They also usually have Apple-specific model numbers. Often they even actually say "Apple HDD firmware" or something similar on the label.

e.g.:

This doesn't mean that Apple's HDDs aren't normal, SATA compatible HDDs like any other. Of course they still work in Windows machines. It just means that Apple has tweaked some of the settings relating to power management to ensure they work well on Macs.

Of course it's possible that this policy has changed recently, and Apple are no longer shipping Apple-specific HDDs in some cases, but that would be news to me.