Hi John, Thank you for the idea that the noise may be related to the disk(s) spinning down at the default time (10 minutes). This may be exactly what is causing the sounds that I hear. I will check into it.
Until recently, I believe that the check box in the Energy Saver panel for "put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" was NOT checked. About a week or two ago, which is about when I started hearing these noises, the sysadmin folks made some energy saving changes to all systems. I forgot about this, but now I see that the box is checked, so that may explain the noises that I hear. To test this, I will uncheck the box for a few days and see if I still hear anything. By the way, for energy saving reasons, I can see why it might be a good idea to put the disks to sleep. Overall, is this good or bad for the health of the disks? Does frequent sleeping and waking put added strain on the disks, so that it is better to let them always run, or is there really no significant disadvantage to putting the disks to sleep? Thanks, Gregg On 19 Jul 2011, at 11:27 PM, John Stalberg wrote: > 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 _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
