27" iMac hard drive noise

You can choose to put your disk to sleep after 1 minute using this tool

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20070163-263.html

and wait until your HDD stop.

I have Imac mid 2011, 21,4" (2,8 GHz, 16 gb ram, Apple 256 GB SSD-hd + 2 TB serialata-HD (Hitachi) and use the Imac as no 2-screen and Eizo CG223w as mainscreen.

I have to say that the noise is making me crazy.

I have been in contact with apple support, but their suggestions (restart etc) did not help. So they adviced me to send the machine to service. Support told me it was fan-noise, but i dont know, sounds more like HD.

Tried to download smcfancontrol, did not help.

So the terrible sound as many of you in this tread describe seems to come from the right side of the Imac. So it seems that it not helped change the Seagate-HD.

By the way: Where is the hd placed it the imac?

NikonMan13, please find your HDD icon in Finder, right-click it and choose Eject. Will the noise stop?

No DizzyDown, it did not help eject my internal drive 2 (the main hd i cant eject).

But i have linked to a file with the noise here!

that's a fan problem for sure. try to set your fans to max with smcFanContrl and keep for 5 minutes (better by creating a new profile there), then set everything back to default. If that won't help request a fan replacement from Apple service.

My iMac has made a puzzling change in the noise the drive makes. It is a:

1 TB Hitachi HDE721010SLA330 Media 27"

and the very best word to describe the noise is sussuration -- at the risk of sounding pretentious. No clicks, whines, or grumbles. Almost like wind flowing, but it has gone from almost silent to this noise winding up every hour or so, to it being almost continuous, and increasing in volume.

I make my living on this iMac and would be very grateful for any comments and suggestions.

Thank you,

Sheila

hi Sheila, it seems that this type of noise is created by all Hitachi models ending SLA330.. BTW this model is dated 2009 so it was awful to have it in newer iMacs. I am not sure how Apple is choosing the Hdd models, I guess they are just installing the most cheap they could order.

and.. if your noise is changing its volume to louder then you probably need to contact the Apple service to replace it.

OK, I have never posted on this forum before, and I have been reading many of the responses. Need some clarification though. I just got my 1 TB Seagate HD replaced and my LCD replaced both under the recall for my 27" Imac. HD went bad and the LCD was getting splotches on it. LCD looks great now, but the HD seems louder and slower than the original HD I had in it. Can this be my imagination? I can't recall hearing the fan/ clicking like I do before the replacement, and it seems to take longer to start up. The replacemnt HD is also ST31000528AS, don't know where to find the revsion #. Thanks for any advice.

Thank you so much for your advice!

You may find how it has developed interesting: the noise in this 27" iMac has subsided to about half now and remains an even shushing sound, rather than increasing periodicallly. Simply by shutting down every night instead of putting it to sleep for a couple days in a row, (wow, that was bad advice from somewhere in the past-- "you can just put your computer to sleep for several days and not shut down") and of course doing disk permission repair -- also running MacJanitor -- both of these a little more often than once a week for now.

In spite of having this dread Hitachi SLA330 drive, it has behaved wonderfullly for years.

REALISATION REGARDING HARD DRIVE NOISE

I thought my iMac 27 i7 2011 was making much louder hard drive noises than previously. After many months of irritation and replacing the drive twice, I realised that I had moved it much nearer the wall. The nearer to the wall the louder the noise. Move it forward away from the wall by a foot and the noise virtually dissappears. I was amazed when I found this. I do think the 2TB Hitachi Drive I have is a dog regards noise but the Seagate wasn't much different and that died on me. Try it.

Hi There,

I have just had my Seagate HD replaced and the replacement hard drive is running really noisy, which id driving me mad. I am going to contact Apple about this. My HD model number is also the same as the old one. It also seems to be responding slower than my old drive and i have just noticed blotches in the top right hand side of my screen. I have had to wait a week for my mac to have work done on it and its aklso a 45min drive to the store, i was wondering if you got back in touch with Apple.

There are hundreds of posts relating to noisy hard drives in 2010-2013 iMacs. From what I can see the following conclusions can be drawn:

Summary of 100's of complaints so far:

• The large 1-2 TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi (That Apple use) are the worst offendors.
• The noise is most commonly described as a (hungry stomach like) grumbing sound that occurs when the drive is read /writing - often when it the user is no iong anthing with mac.
• Apple have replaced a lot of drives due to the noise but there system won't allow replacements other than the problematic Hitachi and Seagate drives. So many people have had multiple drives replaced.

My experience / Hitachi's view

For comparison, my brothers and friends iMacs are silent as no doubt many millions of iMacs are. However, many aren't. So far my iMac went from being silent to noisy (Seagate) and has since had 3 Hitachi 2TB drives which were worse. I've also had the logic board replaced which has maybe improved the sound grumbling level but its still unnaceptable for anyone who isn't deaf or has paid the best part of £2k for a classy computer. On listening to an audio recording, Hitachi informed me in writing that the drive(s) noise was not normal and was due to an incompatibility with the logi board that Apple need to address with an update.

Can you imagine Steve Jobs or Johnathan Ive's saying it was in any way acceptable for a 27 inch iMac to be NOISY and really irritating and thus not suitable for work requiring concentration or worse for audio work like voice over recording. No, they would be as ****** off as we all are.

Apple need to sort this.

Let me add my two cents the issue:

I have the mid-2011 27" iMac 2.7GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM and running OS X v.10.8.3. Never had excessive HDD noises or fan noises.

About two years ago, I took the machine into Apple to replace the 1TB drive that came with it as part of a recall. They replced it with a Western Digital drive WDC WD1001FALS-403AA0. After that event, still didn't have excessive HDD noises or fan noises.

About a year and a half ago, I used the iFixit Hard Drive Upgrade kit to add an SSD drive as my primary drive and made the 1TB drive that came with the machine a secondary drive. For the first six months or so, still didn't have excessive HDD noises or fan noises.

Starting last August, the computer developed a low hum / buzzing sound, something along the lines of speakers turned up too loud without any sound source. I thought my external JBL speakers were failing, unplugged them to see if that fixed it. Nope.

So then I pulled out the fans and inspected them. After removing some dust and other particles, I reinstalled everything and fired the machine back up. The sounds were still there.

I'd also like to add the following:

• Like someone said in an earlier post, the noise level increases when I turn up the brightness on my LCD. However, even if I turn the brightness all the way down, the sound doesn't go away. It just gets quieter.
• I've done all of the SMC and PRAM resets.
• I downloaded two separate fan controller softwares and, as far as they're concerned, the fans are all operating at their normal speeds and temps are all within standard ranges.
• Like a previous poster recommended, I manually turned all fans to their maximum RPM for 5 minutes and then back to default settings to see if that helped. Nope.
• Like a previous poster recommended, I tried ejecting the 2nd internal HDD (WDC WD1001FALS-403AA0) but the noise did not stop.

Any ideas...?

Hey

I recently purchased a refurbed iMac 27 inch 2011 model

The first one I recieved had the read/write rumbling noise, I have owned many Apple computers and never heard this noise from the HD before, I called Apple got a replacement and the same problem again.

These two machines both had WD hard drives, I called Apple for the 3rd time and got the perfect machine without the noise from the HD

This working one I have has a Seagate HD, seems wierd as most people have the problem the opposite way round.

Does this mean I will get the noise eventually?