After taking delivery of a brand new Apple MacBook Pro 15″, I noticed a consitent click, beep, freeze experience. This was to be identified to be the hard drive in the laptop, something sounding akin to the hard drive head moving to the parked position.
The motion of the hard drive head moving could be accepted if it was doing it during a sensible time such as when exccesive shock forces are exerted on the laptop. However, this rather annoying click, beep, freeze experience happens randomly and quite a lot, disrupting work flows due to the freezing after the click and beep from the hard drive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5WPNwtlwd0 illustrates the click, beep, freeze.
Why is this happening?
Seagate claim that this particular hard drive, ST9500420ASG, is not compatible with Apple laptops, (someone claimed on the Apple Discussion Forum). Also this drive has its own G-Force protection system on it, so effectively the MBPros have two. Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor, and Seagate’s G-Force proection system. Crazy. However, you can turn off Apple’s SMS, but this doesn’t help that much.
Discussion Forum
I have been following a lot of threads on the Apple Discussions Forum, in particular the one at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9764921. This thread is particularly popular and seems to have hundreds of other people who have a MBPro with the 7,200 RPM hard drive sharing their problems with the drive too.
Resolution
It has taken many people calling Apple to get their engineers to finally acknowledge there is a issue with the 7,200 RPM drive in the MacBook Pros. Prentiss Riddle, a member of the forums has got confirmation that Apple have “captured” a number of MBPro’s displaying signs of this problem, and are going to try and work on a fix.
Summary
- The hard drives in question appear to be Seagate 7,200 RPM varieties.
- I have a 500GB 7,200 RPM drive. Model number: ST9500420ASG.
- If you have the problem, you will hear a click, then a beep, and while this is occuring, your system will freeze for around 1 second.
- You can try an reduce the problem by turning off the Apple Sudden Motion Sensor, and turning off the energy saving feature whereby the hard drive goes to sleep.
