Strange sound from HD after waking from sleep

[iamnotmad]

Hello, I have a QSDP800, after I wake the machine from sleep, every several minutes I will hear a strange sound come from the hard drive. It's a clicking/semi-grinding sound (not pleasant). I think it may sound a little like the sound the drive makes when I first wake the machine.

In any case has anyone else noticed this? Any ideas? It's very disconcerting. Note that the sound will stop if I reboot. I will not get it again until the machine goes to sleep, and I wake it.

Thanks.

[Makosuke]

My guess is the sound is almost exactly what you said it sounds like--you're probably hearing the drive go to sleep, then immediately wake up again. (Let me also guess that it usually happens when you're not actively doing something on the drive that makes the noise--you've paused to read a web page, for example.) This seems to be a relatively common problem with 10.1 (it didn't exist in 10.0) according to some other posts, and it seems likely (maybe only occurs?) when you have at least two drives installed. Anyway, it's probably some kind of bug with energy saver, but I haven't found any workarounds yet. The only difference is that I've never specifically linked my problem to putting the computer to sleep, but perhaps that percipitates the problem.

Assuming a sleepy drive is your problem, you probably don't have to worry if it gets fixed soon--although waking and sleeping a drive a lot is probably not healthy, it shouldn't cause any problems if Apple fixes the issue in a reasonable period of time. If, on the other hand, your unplesant hard drive sound is caused by something else, I'd backup quickly--drives that sound bad are usually on the way to failure.

Actually it seems to do it while I am actively using the machine. I could have just accessed something on the drive. Unless there is a real bad sleep problem, like once the drive has gone to sleep, it then will go to sleep after a few seconds of no use.

I'll try to pay more attention to see if it in fact does not happen unless i am not using it for even a couple minutes. But your theory sounds plausible. A sleep bug, that sends the drive to sleep after a couple of minutes (or even secinds), after the first time it has gone to sleep.

Note that this noise does not happen at all if I neverf put the drive to sleep.

[Makosuke]

Actually, I've been paying closer attention to my sleep bug, and it looks like you might be right about it not happening unless the computer has been asleep at least once--I can't say for certain, but it does seem that way. At the least, it's intermittent, and there are periods of time when it doesn't seem to happen at all. And I wouldn't be surprised if it decided to go off even when you were doing something--with two drives, I always sort of assume its the one I'm not using, but it may well put either one to sleep randomly, even during use.

[AKMedia]

It might indeed be linked to sleep but it seems to happen on my Maxtor 40 gig firewire drive when a Classic Application accesses the disk on Open or Save commands. My internal drive does not seem to suffer from this problem. Any ideas?