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Is Fusion Drive the reason for strange hdd head noise?

I'm hearing high rates of hdd head movements in my new Mac mini 2012 with 1 TB Fusion Drive. It sounds like the hdd head moving between only a few tracks for each cluster of sound of 10 seconds. During these sounds, no I/O activity is indicated by "iostat 1" for the SSD and HDD (disk0 and disk1) in Terminal.app.


Or just a hard disk with some sector defects?

Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 13, 2012 12:41 PM

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14 replies

Jan 4, 2013 11:23 AM in response to ComputerFixer

I don't see any IO errors in the logs, nor anything really corresponding to disk errors. Also disk utility reported no issues with the disk.


I did see these in the logs when system activity happens on idle:


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Jan 4 20:55:31 home-imac.elisa librariand[324]: unable to get mobile documents URL

Jan 4 20:55:31 home-imac.elisa librariand[324]: error in _handle_client_request: LibrarianErrorDomain/10/Unable to configure the collection.

Jan 4 20:55:31 home-imac.elisa librariand[324]: MMe quota status changed: under quota

Jan 4 20:55:31 home-imac.elisa com.apple.PassXPCService[1285]: PAPassValidator: _signatureIsValid failed to load signature file

Jan 4 20:56:01 --- last message repeated 6 times ---

Jan 4 20:56:11 home-imac.elisa CVMServer[102]: Check-in to the service com.apple.cvmsCompAgent_x86_64 failed. This is likely because you have either unloaded the job or the MachService has the ResetAtClose attribute specified in the launchd.plist. If present, this attribute should be removed.

Jan 4 20:56:11 home-imac.elisa CVMServer[102]: Check-in to the service com.apple.cvmsCompAgent_x86_64 failed. This is likely because you have either unloaded the job or the MachService has the ResetAtClose attribute specified in the launchd.plist. If present, this attribute should be removed.

--clip--


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Jan 4 21:03:08 home-imac.elisa mdworker[1342]: Unable to talk to lsboxd

Jan 4 21:03:08 home-imac.elisa sandboxd[1343] ([1342]): mdworker(1342) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

Jan 4 21:03:08 home-imac.elisa mdworker[1344]: Unable to talk to lsboxd

Jan 4 21:03:08 home-imac.elisa sandboxd[1343] ([1344]): mdworker(1344) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd

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But the really annoying thing is that things like scrolling this discussion page up even a few pixels or moving the cursor while writing to this text box triggers disk writes (page ins). So I'm starting to wonder this is just a combination of an unusually noisy disk & some odd disk paging behaviour.

Jan 5, 2013 10:48 AM in response to Halko

No, I haven't contacted the technical support yet, as I first needed to make sure to have a 2nd backup in parallel to timemachine, if the hdd needs to be replaced. But will do next week.


I don't see any page swapping activity to disk via vm_stat or iostat during the noise, so that's different here. And the solution with safe mode is not possible as safe comes to a standstill (hangs) at about 25% of the progress bar everytime, there without noise.

Apr 10, 2013 12:06 AM in response to nigmia

After I reverted a change I made in a file below /System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles, which was a presumed workaround for a different problem, many message in system.log about "cannot talk to lsboxd", the high hdd seek rate, and thereby the sound on some occasions, stopped now. The change in the files most likely reduced the work for spotlight, so it isn't indexing unneeded system files any more which it did because the workaround was wrong.


Though I have still a problem with the new Mac mini, as while booting in safe mode it hangs forever after the file check, at about 30% of the progress bar. But that shouldn't be the topic in this thread.

May 20, 2013 10:47 AM in response to isenberg

As the noise is still there, I went to the local Apple authorized reseller and they checked it: No fault was found with their diagnostic tools. So it seems a normal issue with this type of harddisk as I read on another forum about Hitachi harddisks being known for their head moving sound caused by their frequent thermal recalibration: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2072955 . As my Mac starts do make that sound after about 4h runtime i.e. after the device heated up, this seems to be a reasonable explanation.


Check via "About this Mac" menu -> more information -> Hardware -> Serial ATA if yours is also an APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662. HTS = Hitachi

The issue with stuck in safe mode was something else. A bug in fsck_hfs (Mac OS X), see

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3750015?answerId=22036432022#22036432022

May 20, 2013 2:30 PM in response to isenberg

I had the same problem:


http://joernhees.de/blog/2011/09/16/mac-os-x-harddisk-high-load-cycle-counts/


Mac OS X’s default power management settings might wear your hard drive down unnecessarily. This post provides a lot of background information and how to change these settings.


I have installed HDAPM and it solved the problem:


http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/usage.html

Is Fusion Drive the reason for strange hdd head noise?

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