I just received my MBP 15″ i5 with upgraded hard drive to 500GB 7200 RPM. The drive turned out to be a Hitachi model exactly same as yours, and not the problem Seagate drive.

My machine has not freezed with normal usage of Itunes, Safari, some HD movie editing in imovie, etc.

I have noticed a slightly audible fan rev or similar from the bottom right area (hard drive area) which then has a single ticking sound from the drive heads perhaps (trying to park), but it seems normal in function as far as I can tell. Had many restarts due to breaks throughout the day and no hang ups, no beach ball, nothing like that.

Seems normal though, as my Mac Pro tower has the drive ticking sound every few minutes when the machine is idle and no apps running, and has been working fine for 2 years.

Can you better describe the ‘constant dull whirring’ you are experiencing?

I noticed a loud squeak that lasts for 1/2 a second when the computer is switched on, or comes out of sleep mode. But most annoyingly, there is a constant dull whirring sound, and intermittent clicking that is quite noticeable, and can be heard over 2 people talking in a room, or quiet background music.. I know the computer isn’t freezing, or anything extreme like that, and i hope i’m not being too petty, but i just wanted to know if anyone else has experienced this.

I can hardly believe that something as simple as this caused such a headache. Finder should be patched to be able to recover from this kind of error.

I’ve installed Temperature Monitor (temps are normal), run Apple Hardware Test from the install disk (regular test & extended test both passed), and software update gives me zilch. I have no idea what’s wrong with this system- I just want it fixed. The freezing is not limited to Safari or Firefox, but Finder, the Dock, and everything else is affected. It takes a minute or more to open the app, and then it seems fine- until I click on something. Anything. Then appears the cursed beach ball, and even though I can still move the mouse around the screen and even drag app windows to different places on the screen, the apps themselves are completely unresponsive to input for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

OS X 10.6.3, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB (PCI) and NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB (PCIe), Serial ATA Hard Drive: NVidia MCP79 AHCI 500 GB 7200 RPM

If anyone has a solution for this problem, I would be grateful for your reply!
Thanks,

~Disgruntled Mac Lover

on powering up , got the white screen of death. booted up off the install cd and used the disk utility – tells me the the hard is unformatted!!

this doesnt exactly give me a ton of confidence, especially since this is my first Mac. for the same price i could have got 2 reasonably specced PC laptops and stuck Ubuntu on both.

i’m going to ask for a refund from my local Apple Store – am not exactly inspired with confidence in this product.

My MacBook Pro 2.66 late 2009 model, 320GB Seagate model ST9320325AS beeps and makes noise and I AM SO VERY SICK OF THIS. Updated, hdapm etc… nothing seems to heal this thing. I’ve searched the net about this, and I have never imagined that there are 10s of thousands of MacBook owners with this issue. I am 98% sure my HDD soon will fail. This is an outrageous problems for such product and PRICE.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=413163

It seems that the buzzing hard drive it’s more like a plastic design problem of apple instead of the hard drive itself. Good luck fixing…

I have not experienced any of the other noises (strange clicking, slow down or freezes others have reported). One other thing I noticed, if I move the mac – such a tipping it vertically, there will be a somewhat loud buzzing sound – I speculate this is the Seagate drive parking the heads rapidly in to protect the drive? This only briefly occurs when moving the laptop.

The laptop also arrived with a handful of small horizontal scratches in the metal case near the track pad. It appears someone at the factory was not very careful during assembly. Most are barely noticeable, but a few are noticeable.

This is my 1st Mac – I am very very surprised by these issues – I had thought Apple had a reputation for quality products with good aesthetics (looks, performances, sounds, etc.)

Read about other mac (Mac desktops) with similar noise issues – people solved it by placing dampening material around the hard drives to stop the adjacent metal parts from resonating due vibrations from the hard drive – not sure how this would work in the Mac laptop.

Haven’t contacted Apple – will do so very soon.

If any one has any ideas/suggestions about the noise, that would be greatly appreciated.

I could be just in TextEdit, I could be listening to music, I could be staring at my deskstop, working in Adobe, looking at my favorite pr0wn..anything. The computer can be cool, running warm, plugged in, running on battery, etc. etc. NO PATTERN. I installed the Performance update 1.0. No luck. It just froze today twice.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.0074.B01
SMC Version (system): 1.33f8
Hardware UUID: 1A082CAA-720E-54C9-B6E2-180B27EEC6E1
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Disabled

I was happier with my old one… should have never upgraded

I have

NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

Vendor: NVidia
Product: MCP79 AHCI
Speed: 3 Gigabit
Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

ST9500420ASG:

Capacity: 500.11 GB (500,107,862,016 bytes)
Model: ST9500420ASG
Revision: 0007APM2

on

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,2
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 3.06 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP52.008E.B05

Google bought me here, was just wondering if anyone can help me out and tell me if this is normal?

Same problem !!

Really need a fix because this is really annoying !!!