iMac - replacement hard drive is much louder!

[nicnic77]

Hi all,

The internal drive in my 11 month old iMac alu died a couple of weeks ago, so I sent it into my local 3rd party Apple store. They sent it off to Apple and managed to replace the drive AND recover all my data, which I am immensely pleased about.

However, I have noticed that the new drive seems to be significantly louder when it seeks. Unless this is my imagination, it used to be whisper quiet, whereas now I'm hearing rumbling "crrrrrr crrrrr" type noises whenever the disk is accessed.

Has anyone else noticed differences in noise levels for iMac drives? Should I complain? I have a couple of weeks left of my warranty, and plan on buying 2 years of AppleCare.

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

Drives do have very different audible noise levels - especially between different makes / brands.

Usually - louder drives (ones that have a lot of vibration) tend to be poorly balanced and are failure prone.

Another possibility is that the didn't install the replacement drive correctly. (there are elastomer mounts to deaden the vibration - perhaps one is pinched, or was not replaced)

I would bring it up, especially if it's very different from before.

 

[nicnic77]

Drives do have very different audible noise levels - especially between different makes / brands.

Usually - louder drives (ones that have a lot of vibration) tend to be poorly balanced and are failure prone.

Another possibility is that the didn't install the replacement drive correctly. (there are elastomer mounts to deaden the vibration - perhaps one is pinched, or was not replaced)

I would bring it up, especially if it's very different from before.

Cheers for the reply. I'm pretty sure it wasn't this loud before, I've always thought the iMac was completely silent to my ears, but the first time I booted it up I thought hmm that's loud...

 

[bertpalmer]

When I used to have a PC I noticed the same thing with different drives.

Some are louder than others although I have never had any fail on me.

May be worth asking if you can have it replaced. Doesn't sound acceptable to me if you paid a company to do it for you.

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

I have a 24" imac (white) and my HD couldn't be heard over the backlight driver. (it was super quiet)

The 1TB Seagate drive I replaced it with, is equally as quiet. (original was a 250gb WD)

So yeah, get it fixed to your liking.

 

[getrusty]

looking forward to getting my 1tb Seagate 7200.11 32mb cache in place to replace my bad drive in my iMac. Which failed 14 months after i purchased my first Mac. I was a little disappointed about this. But maybe more disappointed about the near 400 mark that i was quoted at the apple store which is stupid crazy expensive. The 1tb Seagate was only $110 from MacMall.com