At the beginning of week, we have spoken about the unpleasant beeps made by the 7200 rpm hard drive proposed as an option in the MacBook Pro 2009.
A solution has been found, the details are given by Rémy.
These tedious beeps occur when the disc is inactive and are caused by a system
to reposition the play-back head carried out in a repetitive way.
In addition to the beeps of the hard drive, Mac OS X displays the pretty multicoloured wheel during some seconds while waiting for hard drive to finish these loadings and unloadings of the play-back head.
The solution comes with a utility of the name hdapm (for Hard Disk Advanced Power Management) which makes it possible to change the level of energy management (APM) of the hard drive.
Hdapm can be downloaded from : http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm; hdapm being a command line utility, it is thus necessary to use the Terminal (which is in /Applications/Utilitaires).
After copying hdapm into your user file, the command to enter is:
sudo ~/hdapm disk0 max
- disk0 corresponds to the disc to regulate knowing that hdapm should function with any ATA disk supporting APM
- max is the level of APM which is a number ranging between 1 and 254 included
- the word following are preset and can used in the place a number for the level of APM
- max (maximum performance) is the parameter to use to eliminate the “beeps”.
- min (maximum economy of energy)
- default (returns to the default setting)
The level of APM is a temporary adjustment in the firmware of the hard drive, this adjustment is lost when the disk is powered down and it is thus necessary to redo this at each for each start up.
To install hdapm so it is launched at each start-up, it is necessary to copy hdapm to the hard drive (/usr/local/bin is advised) and to copy the file hdapm.plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons.
It will be can be necessary to you to edit hdapm.plist with the desired parameters; the default settings are: the repertory where hdapm is /usr/local/bin, the hard drive is regulated on the first (disk0) and the level of APM is the maximum.
You can simply copy the file hdapm into /usr/local/bin file if you want to avoid modifying Plist.
Simplest way to reach these files is to use the Go/go to the file and to copy/paste this address before validating.
