27" iMac hard drive noise

thedge wrote:
I am considering buying a new 27" imac and I wonder how widespread this problem is currently.

Is it happening in most new imacs and only certain people who use their system more notice the noise?

Or is it only happening to very few defective new imacs (or certain options)?

My iMac has the 1TB Seagate drive. It is completely silent even though it is the drive that is most often accused. OTOH, my "TimeMachine" drive is under my desk and I have no trouble hearing it operating!

Week 47, and on continuously or sleeping ever since.

I work at night in absolute silence - so a quiet compter is important to me. I was aiming for the benchmark set by my 24" alu iMac - a very feint rumble on write/seek.

I've got a 27" i5, with a 1 TB WD 'Black'. A fair bit of seek/write/read noise (more noticeable than loud, though), silent when idle. I thought about complaining, but wasn't sure I had a complaint.

I've tried a WD 1TB 'Green' - better, but still obvious write/seek/read 'grumbles'. I tried to source one of the Seagate drives, but Seagate referred me to Apple, Apple don't sell HDs. Now, I'm using the WD 320GB out of the 24" iMac. I've put the WD Black in an external caddy for the (rare) occasions I need the space.

No idea what to suggest. I think it's a combination of things - people's reaction to noise and the environment they have; batch variability in HDs; and noise of the HD in any case.

And: 1) iMacs are normally class-leading quiet. If it wasn't for the familiarity of my 24" iMac, this wouldn't bother me, and 2) Opening up the iMac and replacing the disk is a scary business! It's easy to damage the screen/connectors, and in the case of the 24" I've had to replace some tape, so it'd be obvious I've 'been in', so the warranty may be affected.

my 27: imac makes the same grumbling noise + yesterday i plugged in some external speakers and could here the the scroll of the mouse, the downloading of email attachments, all computer activity amplified through the speakers!!! i now have the noisiest computer in the house, and the other one is dell desktop, this isn't right.

Hello 🙂

I have a CTO iMac late 2009 and chose the 2TB hard drive and mine is the Hitachi. It arrived in early december and has been my dream machine - no flickering or flash problems at all. But just the other day I noticed the hard drive starting to make CONTINUOUS noise!! Yes like a grumbling hungry tummy! But even when NO APPS are running - its still grumbling..?? Is this happening to anyone else, I could understand it if i was running heaps of programs - but i get noise all the time even when nothing is open?

Is there some way I could check if it was running a certain process in the background? What does the normal Activity Monitor show when it comes to disk activity - whats normal when nothing is runnin?

Whats the opinion- can these mac hard drive issues be fixed with a firmware update or are they dodgy drives that all need replacing??

This is an absolute joke! After about 2months of silent running my i7 has started the same low 'grumbling tummy' noise that everyone else is talking about it.

I bought the computer for pro-audio work and the noise is terribly distracting when recording and mixing.

Its also showing the beach ball a lot, taking its sweet time to load up any finder windows that I open. When I click sleep it takes the best part of a fortnight to go to sleep and then wakes by itself a few minutes later.

I'm going to back it up and get it into the apple store where they will no doubt tell me I'm imagining things or that I did something wrong - as is the way with the store I use. Problem is that by taking it in I'm likely to lose a few days work!

Its infuriating. Nice one apple:(

week 50 imac i7 quad core with seagate 1TB ST31000528ASQ HDD, just started the grumbling today, after about a month of use.

a fix would be nice. But then again, a fix for the host of SL disasters might also be nice but apparently not forthcoming.

My 27" iMac that I bought on boxing day has always had the sound of the hard drive its the sound of the hard drive reading. It is actually quite loud in my bedroom. For example when clicking on a film I've downloaded and OSX brings up the little preview of a .mkv file you can hear the hard drive working quite hard reading the file it is very noisy. Should I take it back and see if they can change the hard drive? I do have the Apple Protection Plan.

The Hard drive I have is the 1TB Hitachi HDE721010SLA330

I'm experiencing the grumbling noise too. To me it's like a coffee-machine at standby. Altough it's at a rather low volume, it is very annoying and therefore a big dissapointment. This is not why I bought a Mac !!! I was reading about giving it some time and that I will do for now.
Hopefully the people at Apple read these comments too, because it really is a disgrace!

I also have the 1TB Hitachi HDE721010SLA330.

I should've clarified in my last post - my HD is a Western Digital one so it seems that its an issue with the iMac rather than the Hard Drives.

This is my 4th iMac over the years and by far the loudest. I don't accept that it is just run of the mill hard drive noise as none of my previous iMacs have made this sound - my last one had the same capacity drive as well.

Just bought my 27" iMac 2 days ago and I hear a constant low rumbling sound from the HD. I know this is somewhat normal, but even on a web page or scrolling, its constantly "working" about every 3 seconds. Just trying to see whats up with this? My 24" was dead silent no matter what I did. Its not a huge deal, but after reading other peoples post it seems this might be an issue. Hope there is a fix or update coming? Does Apple know about this?

This week my problems have gotten worse.

Several programs don't respond when I try to open them. Logic 9 will only open after a computer restart and sometimes when coming back from screensaver will be completely frozen and require a force quit - you wouldn't believe how meticulous I've become about saving projects now!

Sometimes my Mackie MCU controller is recognised, sometimes its not. Sometimes USB devices are picked up, sometimes not.

I've done everything apple have advised me to do... no other options now but to back it up and bring it in:(

Hello!

I have a 21,5" 1 TB iMac and I was wondering if the sound my hard drive is making is normal. Every time when I start a program you hear him working. I think that's normal. But very often when I do nothing I hear the hard drive making weird noises out of nowhere! Of course it is normal you hear the hard drive work. But is this also a normal thing?

Best regards

I got my new Core i7 yesterday and lo and behold, grumbling tummy noise a lot of the time! It sounds like the LaCei drive I hated, but not such a loud rat a tat, more a gentle grumble! The drive is:
Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 drive, that others have said are silent?

Anyway, apart from that 24 hours in it is a rather magnificent machine. I usually have iTunes on or TV in background, so doesn't really bother me too much, although I can imagine over time this will start to grate.

I checked the disk with iDefrag and saw a 0.03% fragmentation was the most on any part of the disk, so not really blamable.

Hopefully there will be some sort of fix at some point.

I called the support line twice and my next move is now an authorized apple technician. Are people living with this or are you seeking remedies? I live three hours from the closest apple store, so I am figuring on demanding a HD replacement. I can't live with this sound - it is not normal. This is the most expensive and most annoying computer I have ever owned (27" iMac.) First apple computer and I hate using it 😟.

Well, I bought the iMac i7 last Saturday and it was supposedly manufactured in Week 10 (so, March 2010) and it still has screen issues (dark areas around the edges of the screen) and this grumbling noise from the hard drive, which is easily the most annoying of the two problems.

I just phoned Applecare and the agent that I spoke to had no experience of complaints from people about the hard drive problem and stated that there is no order from Apple stating that this is a quality control issue. Apple are clearly happy with the quality of the units that they are putting out to customers (not reviewers I wager), which means that if this continues I will no longer be an Apple hardware supporter. And I HATE Windows with a passion.

The i7 is going back to store next week (there is no way on God's earth that I'm going back in there on a Saturday again. Teenage girls on Facebook on every machine without a "Genius" has warned me away for good.

I'm an Apple devotee that can now see behind the gloss. Either they improve the quality again or I'm out for good and building my own silent computer again.