Soft Clicking

Hi everyone, this is my first post so please forgive me if I do something wrong
Anyway, I recently (about 3 weeks ago) tried to upgrade my hard drive, a 250gb Seagate 5400rpm, to a 500gb Seagate 7200rpm, but the upgrade drive was shipped broken and after 3 days of suffering I shipped it back to Newegg. I put my old drive back in, having learned the valuable lesson that "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". It worked fine and still does; boot up is still 34 seconds, and data access is speedy. The only problem is that it (or possibly something else) is making a very soft crackling/clicking noise that occurs randomly. SMART says the drive is fine, and since everything else is OK, I do not know if the sound is even the drive. I checked out a thread about fan noise, and the sound described is similar to mine, but my fan still spins silently at any RPM, and the noise does not increase as RPM increases. The crackling is the loudest over the hard drive area, but I can hear it with my ear down anywhere on the computer. I am running out of ideas, so any help would be greatly appreciated


Additional Details:
- The noise seems to be loudest (though still soft) during bootup.
- It also seems to be louder when I play a 3D game such as TF2 or Portal (anything that gets the GPU and CPU hot).
- There does actually seem to be a slight rythm to it, it happens every 10 seconds or so with computer unplugged, and almost constantly with it plugged in.
- Computer is 15" Macbook Pro: 2.53 Ghz C2D, 4gb DDR3, GeForce 9400M 256mb

It may be the hard drive you're hearing. Run some diagnostics: Boot the machine with your install DVD and run Disk Utility. Do a Verify and Repair on the entire hard drive. If it reports errors, allow them to be repaired and repeat the process. Keep repeating until all (if any) errors are resolved.

Regards.

chscag said:

It may be the hard drive you're hearing. Run some diagnostics: Boot the machine with your install DVD and run Disk Utility. Do a Verify and Repair on the entire hard drive. If it reports errors, allow them to be repaired and repeat the process. Keep repeating until all (if any) errors are resolved.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Agreed. Also, hard drives are rather sensitive.. You may have caused the arm inside to skew thus resulting in random spurts of noise. Very common when people try to swap their hard drives and then come to the help desk with clicking machines

Thanks for the advice and explanation guys, I'll do that.

decipher which

Hey guys, I ran diagnostics with boot CD and did repair but everything came back fine. I guess I'm just being a bit paranoid with all of this, but oh well, we Mac users tend to be The noise is still there, but if diagnostics says it's fine I guess it probably is. Thanks for the advice anyway, and I'll be more careful next time I try a HDD upgrade (because despite my bad experience, I know I'm going to try again )