Removing clicks on Mac mini (and Macbook)

A long time ago I noticed that during the downtime of my Mac's Winchester Mini, it makes such clicking sounds at intervals of about five seconds. And with every click the system thought for a moment. Well, in principle, it was unnoticeable during operation, since the hard drive is not idle and there are no clicks. Recently, these sounds began to be noticed at night, when the computer remained on for downloading torrents. It became annoying. In addition, these delays are tired while watching a video, when the image and sound stop for a split second, and then jumps forward for a couple of seconds.

It was useful to search for a solution on the Internet, as it turned out, this is not only me and the other Mini-owners, but also the MacBook owners. Naturally, the hard drive turned out to be to blame, as it so often parks the heads to conserve energy. In the English version, these sounds are called Marble drop (marble drop), which quite accurately describes the sensation of sound - as if marble falls into the sand.

The worst thing is that these parking lots significantly worn out the resource of the hard drive. A total of 300,000 parking lots are allowed. In the course of a year and a half, almost 200,000 times had already been snapped off!


Of all the solutions I came up with this:
The magic declunk program. Every five seconds it creates and after the same time deletes the file in the / tmp folder. Because of this, the hard drive does not have time to "think" that you can safely park and clicks disappear!
')
I downloaded the declunk program from Kiza's place . It turned out to be compiled for PowerPC processors, but, blessing, the source code goes with the program, I very simply recompiled it for Intel and changed the time from 5 seconds to 1 second - even in 2 seconds my hard drive sometimes has time to “drop the marble” :)

So, the recipe of manufacture:

1. Copy the contents of the downloaded disk image somewhere in your home directory. I copied to / users / alf / declunk.

2. Start the terminal, and execute:

$ cd / Users / alf / declunk / source && make

3. In the folder / Users / alf / declunk a file appeared declunk - our compiled program.

4. Now run the install.command file directly from the Finder by double-clicking. In the terminal window you are asked to enter the root password! Be ready for this.

5. If declunk appeared in the processes, then everything worked out for you!

In case the hard drive continues to drop marble :), then try changing the value in the line in the source file ./source/declunk.c

int interval = 5;

on

int interval = 1;

or on your own, chosen by practical consideration. Then recompile and reinstall.

Good luck!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

UPDATE:

Mr. AOcean’s brilliant comment made me dig deeper into finding a solution to this problem without crutches. And for my hard drive (FUJITSU MHV2060BHPL) the solution was as follows:
1. Download the hdparm port for Windows from this page ( Just installed Windows XP in BootCamp for the game SPORE )
2. Install and run. In the console window we write the commands for setting the hard drive operating mode:

hdparm -B 254 hda
hdparm -M 254 hda

3. Turn off and turn on the computer.
Hooray! Declunk crutches we no longer need! Thank you all for the good advice!

UPDATE2:

For Linux users, an Decoy user article has appeared with extended information on solving problems in this OS, and is located at this address:
http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/ubuntu/43059/