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Are iMac hard drives failing fast?

Gibson88

Gibson88

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 25, 2006
957
147
United Kingdom
Hey everyone, I'm about to pick up a Imac tomorrow. (2009 20")

My only concern is that i have read that loads of Seagate 7200.11 drives are failing and I'm guessing that is what's in the current iMacs.

Could anyone shed some light on this? Or let me know if you have had one of your drives fail or someone you know? Also could someone tell me if the new 9400m iMacs use the 7200.12's yet?

Thanks.
 
Caris said:
Hey evryone, I'm about to pick up a Imac tomorrow. (2009 20")

My only concern is that i have read that loads of Seagate 7200.11 drives are failing and I'm guessing that is what's in the current iMacs.

Could anyone shed some light on this? Or let me know if you have had one of your drives fail or someone you know? Also could someone tell me if the new 9400m iMacs use the 7200.12's yet?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

I think they are Western Digital. Can anyone confirm this? I can look when I get home. Just got a new 24" iMac.
 
I've had 2 WD HDD's fail in my 24" iMac (Jan. 2008 purchased). The last time I had the HDD replaced the Apple Genius told me there was a known issue with the DVD-R cable that was causing HDD's to fail. I can only assume this has been fixed since my version of the iMac, so I wouldn't be too concerned about this issue anymore.
 
All the new iMacs HDD are Western Digital Caviar. The lower ranged models have Caviar Blue's in them and the higher end models have the WD Caviar Black.
 
Western Digital Drives Failing Too!

I wanted to reply to this thread... don't get your hopes up... the Western Digital drives in the iMac 20 and 24 inch, are failing as well.

In our office we have 4 iMacs. 2 of them failed at the same time.... conveniently when the warranty had JUST finished. And the other 2 will be approaching that date soon. So we'll see if they fail too.

I'm curious if there is a large amount of people out there who's drives are failing in the latest iMacs. And if so, we should all band together to have a recall initiated.

With mine, the failure began when it began to not start up properly. I'd have to hit the back button to get it to restart, and then eventually it came up. Then I just got to the grey screen with the darker grey apple and it never booted up after that. I tried everything... wouldn't work with disk repair. Wouldn't reinstall the software... even though the hard drive was showing up in the utility area... then it just died all together. No HD image.

I have one at home too, and I'm just waiting for it to fail. So everyone make sure they are updated to Leopard and are running time machine. That is the only thing that saved my 'you know what!'
 
Every HD can and will fail, it just depends when. My parents have 8 years old PC still running all same components and it's on 24/7. Some HDs are "lemons" and can fail after 2 hours of use but some will last decades
 
My refurbished 2.8 Imac's hard drive completely crashed after just 2 months
There was no warning at all.
 
Glad I came across this thread. I want to get an 24" iMac in September when they start shipping with Snow Leopard. My friend has white MacBook and his
HD crashed about a year or so after buying it. Something I definitely don't want to run into.
 
Buy your extended warrenty if you can!

My IMAC hard drive failed after a year and a half of use. Per Apple technical support "You were lucky it lasted that long. This is an extreemly common problem for IMACs. We are replacing IMAC hard drives with as little as 2 months of use. It is to be expected." Oh yeah, he didn't forget to rub in the salt and say "you should have bought the extended warrently" (unlining sub-text: Sucks to be you!)

If anyone has NOT bought your extended warrently - do it now. Don't forget your backup hard drive so you can save your data. At least I did that right.
 
WD in mine and it's running great.

Electronics run the risk of failing. The people who made the HD didn't intend on it failing... it just happens.
 
I've been trying to resurrect these threads with this topic in mind.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/725759/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/404542/

In summary I own a 3.06 ghz C2D early 08 Imac. It came with a 500GB WDC Caviar SE drive. (7200 rpm). It started failing in 13 months. 1 month after warranty. And I swear I hardly use this machine. I couldn't boot up into my OS and it would freeze up during use. Using Istat Pro I witnessed my drive reach temps of 130F+

Eventually I changed it out for a WDC 1TB Caviar Black. This is the same drive that Apple ships out in the new Imac. Problem is it runs hot also. The manufacturer suggests that both WDC drives I have should run within an operating temp of 5-55C (or 131F). First day after installing my new HDD I saw the temp rise to 139F. All I was doing was downloading an Apple Update and transferring files from my USB external to new internal. Room temp was 77F. All the while, to my disappointment as the temp rose the fans in the machine never bumped up in RPM, with the CPU and HDD fans staying constant at 1199 rpm and Optical Drive at 699 rpm.

So basically our components are just baking within this thing. Not happy. Had I known about the poor management of heat in these things I would have NEVER bought an Imac. If you subject a HDD to it's max operating temp all the time, it's going to fail prematurely.

Since Apple can't manage this heat for us I have no choice now but to use SmcFanControl to bump up the fan speeds myself and bring the HDD down to a 121F level.

Just think about how many of us don't even bother to monitor temps in our Imacs. Most will probably experience drive failure within 1-2 yrs.

Perhaps as one poster suggested, we should ban together and confront Apple together.
:mad::mad::mad::mad:
 
iMacs uses the same HDs as PCs!

There's no such a thing as "Apple HD" so it's not Apple's fault. HDs can and will fail during the time. Use SmcFanControl to keep temperatures low so it will last longer. HD failure is the most common problem, but it isn't a big one. Just have a decent back up and you'll be safe. You can change HD yourself if you're out of warranty or just send ti to Apple. HD failure is tiny compared to logic board failure...
 
Annngel said:
Who said anything about Apple making HDs..

I thought iMac22 was ranting about how poorly the iMac was designed that doesn't allow heat to dissipate quickly..
Click to expand...

I know no-one said that Apple make the drives but almost everyone gives a picture that it's Apple's fault that HDs die.
 
Hellhammer said:
I know no-one said that Apple make the drives but almost everyone gives a picture that it's Apple's fault that HDs die.
Click to expand...

It IS Apple's fault if the hard drives die because they've designed their system to allow them to run over their designed max temperature spec (which I'm not saying they do.....but IF they did).
 
It's not Apple's fault if the HDD fails! I have a 6 year old Dell laptop that i use every day whose HDD is working like a charm. I don't consider it to be Dell's fault though for it's success. I just got a lucky computer. Needless to say the screen has two lines of dead pixels, but that is the screen manufacturers fault. What makes the computer seller worthwhile is their customer support and how they deal with thee random failures.
 
Apple's fault? I didn't know they made HDD's. I guess they're expanding to hardware now. What I did was upgrade the RAM and HDD on my MacBook Pro, now I can't really blame Apple for anything but the logic board, I suggest those who blame Apple for failing HDD's do the same. :rolleyes:
 
Did either of you read what I said?

Forget hard drives...it's all in how the parts are implemented...let's say Apple buys CPUs from Intel. The CPUs are spec'd at 2.0 GHz...Apple clocks them at 3.2GHz but doesn't add any additional cooling over the stock fan. When the CPU burns up, is it Intel's fault or Apple's fault?

What I meant was if Apple is pushing a device (hard drive) past it's recommended specs and the part fails, it's Apple's fault, not the hard drive mfgrs fault. I'm also not saying Apple is pushing the devices too hard...I'm saying "IF".
 
My hard drive on imac has also failed - this is ALSO about 1 year after I purchased it! I think there has to be some sort of heat issue as fhall1 mentions above.

First started noticing it get very slow and the top would get unusually hot, after a while it stopped responding. I've been trying to start up, but can't even see the hard drive image in Disk Utility when I boot up from the CD. Strange thing is that the fans remain quiet even while it is heating up.

If I knew about these hard drive failures with iMacs when I was about to buy one - I would never have purchased one. I'll have to replace the HD with a new one - but who knows how long before that one tanks.
 
imorerobot said:
My hard drive on imac has also failed - this is ALSO about 1 year after I purchased it! I think there has to be some sort of heat issue as fhall1 mentions above.

First started noticing it get very slow and the top would get unusually hot, after a while it stopped responding. I've been trying to start up, but can't even see the hard drive image in Disk Utility when I boot up from the CD. Strange thing is that the fans remain quiet even while it is heating up.

If I knew about these hard drive failures with iMacs when I was about to buy one - I would never have purchased one. I'll have to replace the HD with a new one - but who knows how long before that one tanks.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry to hear you lost a drive. The symptoms you described were consistent with mine. My advice, look for a HDD that generates less heat. Slap that in and then use an external firewire for the bulk of your storage.
 
Interesting thread! I wonder if the new 2.66 24 inch model that works only with the less-heat-generating 9400 will have the same rate of hdd failure. I want to get a Mac desktop eventually but the options are so limited. Imac would be more or less close to ideal, but I'm not at all crazy about their heat-sourced troubles.
 
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