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Mac Mini 2011 Hard drive noise
- Thread starter erpetao
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What kind of noise are you talking about? My 2010 mini makes faint clicking and whirring noises when I'm doing something intense with the HDD or the optical drive, but you can't hear this unless everything else around you is absolutely silent. So if you're talking about those kinds of noises it probably is normal.
Should have got an SSD.
It shouldn't be *that* loud though, same as a MBP I'd say...
Yes, I will get an SSD in the future.
It's not the same as the MBP, I never heard the MBP hard disk since I bought it a year ago, it's completely silent.
Yes, it's a faint clicking and whirring noise, but I thought I would hear nothing.
I hear it when everything is silent. Now for example, I'm watching BBC news and I can't hear it.
Also bear in mind that I have only 2GB of ram (8GB just ordered to OWC), and I've been importing a full gallery of Aperture (40GB), so swapping has been quite intense.
What I also noticed is that Safari is quite hard disk intensive when opening a new website. Firefox is much smoother, and doesn't seem to need so much HD access.
Well, I've received my Mac mini. I played around with it and noticed that, with your description, but not loud at all--very muted--was what I could hear. I needed to put my ear next to it, to notice.
You might want bring it to the nearest Apple Store and see what they say.
A number of years ago both Seagate and Hitachi worked hard at minimising the acoustic noise level of their HDD's. Seagate gave up a few years ago and Hitachi recently was taken over by Western Digital so that looks set to change as well (cheap and nasty rather than top quality).
My recent MAc Mini 2010 has a Hitachi HDD. There is on the Hitachi website a tool available that will allow you to change the noise level of the HDD but performance will go down slightly. Unfortunately this requires a PC to boot and then adjust and does not work on the Mac Mini: means taking out the HDD and mounting it in a PC etc. I will not do this but will put in a SSD instead. (Intel X25M that I bought in February for a laptop that I am now going to demote from production machine to backup/development machine.) When I bought this laptop it had a Seagate in it but after a week I had enough of the loud noises made by the head movements and replaced it with a Hitachi Travelstar and switched that to the quiet mode.
A spinning disk is going to make some noise, we're talking 5200 rpm here. You might try placing the mini on an acoustic mat (heck an old mousepad might help) as the vibration frequency could be getting amplified by the structure of your desktop and other objects if the noise seems abnormally audible.
I always placed my laptops on two strips of rubber that are nurmally used in cars / trucks for sealing doors and boots. Serves two purposes: allows free air underneath (cooling) and damping vibration. The Mac Mini that I bought 10 days ago has a small piece of rubber sitting under each corner. Make sure to get something that is more like a very high density foam so that there is a bit of give in it (not a solid block). I was going to put my Intel X25M 80 Gb into the mini but I have found some positings of a person who has had three failures of that particular model with OS X so I am getting cold feet and will rethink it. But the built in HDD is not very loud and not really annoying, quite pleasantly surprised by it.