MacBook Pro Hard Drive Woes Acknowledged by Apple, Fix Coming Soon

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 11 Aug 2009

It seems that some 15” MacBook Pro devices fitted with 7200RPM 500GB hard drives are affected by a rather annoying problem: the hard drive makes clicking sounds and as if that wasn’t enough, sometimes the hard drive stalls right in the middle of performing a task. After numerous complaints about this issue have been posted on Apple’s Discussion Board, the company is finally going to take charge and address the issue.

Cupertino-based software developer Apple has announced that it is not a strange to the hardware problems experienced by some MacBook Pro owners. The issue will be addressed via a software update. Apple is working on the update right now and will release it as soon as it is ready – no precise release date has been provided, but I’m assuming it can’t be more than a few days.

“We are aware of the issue and are working on a software update,” is the statement that CNET got out of Apple spokesperson Bill Evans on Monday.

The problems MacBook Pro users have been experiencing go something like this: they hear the device give off a beep which is followed by hard drive clicks. Then the best part follows: the computer becomes unresponsive for a period of about 10 seconds. Then the device starts working normally, as if nothing happened. The user does not lose any data because the MacBook Pro springs back to life on its own without having to force-reboot it. Patience seems to be the key here – just wait for it to respond to your commands again, do not rush to perform a force reboot.

The unresponsiveness issue is completely random. If it would have been triggered by a specific task, then it would have been easier to avoid it. But since it doesn’t matter what you are doing, there’s no avoiding it.


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