Loud/Noisy Hard Disk Mid 2012 MacBook Pro.

iphoneuser2012 wrote:

What would you do?

Go back to the store and ask for a new one.

That's not normal, the machines are as quiet as a mouse sneaking across floor at a library filled with cats.

I had an old MacBook Pro with the same problem. Originally, it was quiet as a mouse. After some time, it developed the whirring, whoosing noise. Put pressure on the case above the drive or squeeze the case and the noise would be attenuated, almost eliminated. For a while, I even used one of those monster document clips around the side of the case. Looked tacky, interefered with closing the laptop, etc., so I dropped it.

I ended up sending the MBP under Apple Care for that and other things. The others were fixed, but not the drive noise. Another year passes, and I sent it in again for several problems--including a flakey battery that was still in purportedly "good" condition. I must have won the service technician lottery because he fixed all sorts of extra things and even the drive noise!

ds store, I love the imagery.

"the machines are as quiet as a mouse sneaking across floor at a library filled with cats."

However, what happens in reality is that one of the cats spots the mouse and all **** breaks loose. Noisy, scratchy, meowing, and crying everywhere--much the noise that many are reporting from their MBP 2012s! 🙂

I have the 13" 2.9Ghz model. I've only had it for a couple of weeks, but the 750GB Hitachi drive is also making the sound that you're describing. It's not terribly noisy, but it is most certainly audible, even when I'm sitting far away from the machine. This is the first new Apple laptop that I've owned that I can hear the drive right out of the box.

So, is it normal? Um...maybe? I guess I would expect it across the board. I have heard of people replacing the drive with different brands to find that the problem is alleviated. It just hasn't been worth the hassle for me. I do require a silent machine for audio recording, but I do most of that with a PowerMac G4 running with an SSD.

Just in case you were still researching this issue....

I just traded my 13" machine in for the 2.3Ghz 15" model. This one has a Toshiba drive. The 'woosh' sound is still present, but to much less an extent.

I too have same issue as original post. Just picked up a brand new Macbook Pro 13" 2.5 GHz.

The drive, not the fan, is pretty loud just idling. Sounds like a fan almost, but it's not the fan. It is certainly louder than any previous macbook I have ever owned, as its the first time I've ever noticed and been bothered by the ambient noise of the Mac (in a quiet room).

Was wondering if the O.P. had any news. Did you get it fixed? Did you ever find out if this is normal?

Thanks.

My 500GB HDD was a Toshiba. I went to a best Buy (because it is a little quieter than the Apple Store) and could not hear any noise from their display model, and it showed it had a 500GB Apple HDD in the system profiler.

Anyway, it seems to be a widespread issue with high capacity drives that has been around since 2011, maybe longer.

So I bit the bullet, and returned my Macbook for a new one (on order) that will have the 128GB SSD drive instead. No moving parts should mean no more annoying whirring noise.

Hello guys! Just came back from the Apple Store. They told me that the sound is the Hard Drive working. I was told that the sound was too loud from normal so I could have it replaced. So they did! New MacBook Pro, no sound at this point!

I FOUND THE SAME AS YOU FACED.I bought new macbook pro 13. 2013. I found noisy sound in it.Do you know if it is normal sound.I WENT APPLE STORE (GENIUES BAR) AND THEY TOLD ME THERE IS NO SOUND AND EVEN THERE IS SOUND IT WILL BE NORMAL, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO REPLACE IT. DO YOU THINK IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO IT.

Hey, I still have a loud fan-like sound from de HDD, I just live with it and I think is normal... I will buy an SSD and replace de HDD, SSD is flash so no nosie will come out.

I think there is some type of OSX issue here, too. When I upgraded to 10.7.5, I started to get all sorts of weird things happening. Safari and Firefox would freeze intermittently--the page would load, but you couldn't scroll down the page at all. I realized I could tell it was about to occur because my disks would start spinning loudly right before. To stop the weirdness I have to tell the computer to sleep. Then after sleep makes the loud noise finally stop, I wake it up. Then there is no more noise and the browsers work fine. It is still all a mystery to me how the noise and the freezing are connected. (I know there is also some type of known OSX problem where the fan gets out of control, too.) I am SO sorry I upgraded. I have never had problems like this before with my Mac, and I am heartsick about it.

So given all this weirdness, I have bought a 2 TB external drive, a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner, and I have made a bootable copy of my entire hard drive. I have a feeling that down the line I am going to be happy I did this.