Troubleshooting IBM Deskstar/Travelstar hard drives

Writing Zeros Thomas Jensen reports that using Apple's Disk Utility to write zeros to a faulty Travelstar or Deskstar hard drive can help reduce frequency of clicking sounds, and other problems:

"I started experiencing clicking sounds, during which the drive hangs, shortly after upgrading to Mac OS 10.2.3. Apple's Disk Utility (10.2.1-10.2.2-10.2.3, 9.2.2) and Techtool Pro 3.08 all report the drive to be faultless. Formatting the drive is possible, but writing zeros with Disk Utility 9.2.2 failed. However, writing zeros with Disk Utility 10.2.3 succeeded and afterwards a fresh 10.2.3 was installed. This has reduced, but not eliminated the clicking sounds."

Using APM Tuner Some of the clicking problems are caused by the Deskstar and Travelstar's tendency to "park heads" too often. In other words, the drive heads stop ("park") at sectors on the disk in order to save power, sometimes causing the clicking noise that is accompanied by significant delays in disk access.

Marc Bizer suggests using the shareware utility APM Tuner, which allows you to adjust the Advanced Power Management Value (APM Value) for hard disks in the internal ATA bus and expansion bays of recent PowerBooks. From the program's ReadMe file:

"Advanced Power Management is a feature found in hard disks for portable usage aimed at conserving power. However, APM can effect the user experience, creating a sense of 'lag' or clunking sounds when the head is parked. By increasing the APM Value, the drive will 'park' its heads less often. The result is a more responsive drive with less 'clunking.'"

Download APM Tuner 1.0b1 [45 KB]

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