The OEM drive in my MacBook was a Toshiba 60GB (MK6034GSX, 5400RPM, 8MB cache, 0.75W at idle). This drive was quick and almost entirely silent, but my photos were quickly eating up the space. So, in July 2007, I ordered a Hitachi Travelstar 200GB hard drive (7K200, 7200RPM, 16MB cache) from ZipZoomFly.
Initially, the drive seemed great. Boot-up time was substantially quicker. Adobe Lightroom browsed and exported noticeably faster. However, the honeymoon was over quickly. I noticed that it made a lot of clicking noise. Often, simply scrolling up or down a web page would cause several irritating clicks (and this is with 2GB RAM and no other apps running).
After putting up with it for several months, I contacted Hitachi support. They suggested using their Feature Tool to turn on sound management, which I couldn’t do because they don’t support the Intel Macs. Based upon my description, the customer service rep recommended that I return the possibly defective drive.
Within a week I was happily installing my shiny, new replacement. Sadly, the feeling faded when I found that the new drive was as bad as, if not worse than, the first Hitachi drive.
Last night, I realized that I could, in fact, run the Hitachi Feature Tool, since SATA is standard across both notebooks and desktops! I moved the drive to my old desktop, booted the Feature Tool CD, and enabled sound management.
The drive is now noticeably quieter, but still extremely annoying compared to the original Toshiba disk. I would estimate that it clicks approximately half as often.
I will be ordering a 200GB, 7200rpm Toshiba drive as soon as they’re in-stock, and retire this awful Hitachi disk for use in my HTPC in the living room. Hopefully, I won’t notice the sound from across the room…
