On 20 jul 2011, at 02:43, Macs R We <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> On Jul 19, 2011, at 3:50 PM, Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Thanks for the information.  I guess one of my hard drives is probably bad, 
>> or going bad. 

The time you mention, 10 minutes, match the default spin down time. You say the 
clicks comes when the machine doesn't do anything (user generated stuff). If 
the machine doesn't do anything for 10 minutes, the system hard drive most 
often spin down. This is dependent on the setting in System Preferences ~> 
Energy Saver ~> Put hard disk to sleep when possible. 10 minutes is the default 
time until spin down. Some disk's are quiet and others are audible. It might be 
a noice that would be within what the manufacturer have specified if speced at 
all? I think newer disk drives are less noisy than older ones.

Since it is difficult to take a description of the sound instead of experience 
it ir on location, I can't say if the sound is beyond reasonable or not?

But this is probably a lousy point in time to try to save a buck or two. Hdd's  
doesn't cost much. I recomend you to consider using RAID0 mirrors on the 
internal drives. It would theoretically allow you to keep the questionable disk 
drive up and running, without any reason to be overly nervous for a disk drive 
failure.

If you can afford it, and don't need all these drives for other purposes, you 
could buy 4 drives for RAID10 (both speed boost and redundancy.

You could also buy 3 disk drives and take 2 for a mirrored pair and let the 
third be a spare. Or just 2 and no spare. Or just one and perhaps find yourself 
in this nervous situation again if that single drive missbehaves as this does?

If you can get informed about when disk spin down is executed you could listen 
and see if the two match?

// John Stalberg
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