I put Panther on my G3 iMac 500 about a month ago and I love it, but now my hard drive, I guess, is clicking and wirring a lot. The clicking has me nervous. I have scanned with the disk utility and shows OK. It never did this in OS 9. Any G3 imac owners want to own up to their machines age and offer some advice or explanation?
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iMac G3 making noise, what up?
- Thread starter imnotquitesure
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This is natural. Hard drives do that, I'm guessing you just have an especially noisy one. Also OS X probably uses the drive a lot more and reads it more, so more clicking would happen. Correct me if I'm wrong..
imnotquitesure said:
The clicking is normal, how much RAM do you have? If you have a low amount, I'm guessing your iMac came with 128MB, it's just OS X reading/writing to the swap file. Try to increase you RAM to about 512MB for best performance.
About the whirring noise is it a "normal" hard drive spinning sound or more of a loud high pitched metallic scrapping sound? If it's the latter than you might have a dying hard drive. I've heard of several iMac drives made by Quantum (one of mine included) dying in this manner.
Clicking is certainly *not* normal behavior. A few years ago there was a huge increase in the failure of IBM Deskstar drives, all which exhibited the dreaded 'click of death'.
If the clicking is loud, persistent, and sounds different than the normal seek/writing HDD chatter, I would quickly back my stuff up and replace the drive.
If the clicking is loud, persistent, and sounds different than the normal seek/writing HDD chatter, I would quickly back my stuff up and replace the drive.
You can expect a Hard Drive to die after about 5 years of normal home use. When you hear clicking noises, it's starting to die. Luckly, the iMacs are very easy to take apart and replace the hard drive and replacement drives are cheap. At least you have some warning so you can start backing up your data.
I got plenty of RAM 640 MB. Its a Maxtor hard drive, arent they good. 5 years doesnt sound like a long time for a hard drive. Ive seen computers way older that have had no failures and this one is maybe 4 years old. Im not liking the doom and gloom predictions. none the less I backed up last month and will quickly back up the new files to be safe.
I've had a Maxtor die after 6 months. Of course it was still under warranty so we got a free replacement (another Maxtor). I recommend replacing yours with a Seagate.