Hard Disk constant chatter/grinding

[otispunkmeyer]

Hey, my 27" iMac has recently started doing this constant chattering noise with the hard disk. it doesnt sound like intense disk activity but its like its doing some background loading or something

thing is... activity monitor reports zero reads in and zero writes out... so according to the computer the hard disk is doing nothing, or should be doing nothing. But clearly from the sounds its making, its doing something.

What gives? I am about to praise the ground apple care and time machine walk on?

 

[djc6]

Might as well try one of these utilities to see if the HD is about to fail:

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/

I just got done replacing the HD in my iMac... first symptom was the system being slow. Then I ran SMART Utility and it reported a pending failure.

Oh, and backup your stuff

 

[skiltrip]

I noticed this on my 2010 i7. I'd be doing light web browsing and there'd be way more disk activity than there should have been. I had 8GB of ram in it too.

Unfortuneately I can't tell you much more because I returned it to buy one of the new quad MacBook Pros.

 

[philipma1957]

Hey, my 27" iMac has recently started doing this constant chattering noise with the hard disk. it doesnt sound like intense disk activity but its like its doing some background loading or something

thing is... activity monitor reports zero reads in and zero writes out... so according to the computer the hard disk is doing nothing, or should be doing nothing. But clearly from the sounds its making, its doing something.

What gives? I am about to praise the ground apple care and time machine walk on?

do you know how to clone your hdd in the iMac with superduper to an external hdd? I would clone the internal hdd to an external hdd . I would boot the iMac with the external hdd. If that works I would erase the internal hdd. I would do a fresh install just osx. At this point in time I would run the imac with the internal hdd. If it works your hdd was courrupted somehow and it is now fixed. if it does not work the hdd is bad and have it replaced by apple care.