"How Do I Stop the Clicking Noise from the Hard Drive of My MacBook or Mac Mini?"
Updated 1/20/2010 Energy-efficient hard drives that are optimized for Windows can cause incessant clicking as annoying as a water drip when used with Unix-based systems like Mac OS X or Linux on a computer that's idling. That's because this kind of drive will park its head after only seconds of inactivity -- and then the computer immediately calls it back into action. Even when this isn't loud enough to annoy the user, it causes excessive wear and premature aging of the drive. On Macs, this is often found in replacement drives for the MacBook and the Mac Mini. Apple modifies the firmware of drives it supplies to avoid this problem, but no one does that for the speedier, larger replacements. Upgraders get more -- or less -- than they bargained for. How can you tell for sure if your drive is affected? Download a shareware program like smartctl or Volitans Software's Smart Utility and look for the load cycle count. Hard drives are rated for only a few hundred th