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Anyone have this noise with the new mini?

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whitedragon101

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 11, 2008
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I have just opened my new Mac mini and I have noticed it making a strange noise. Its not very loud and sounds like hard drive chatter. But then I paused and thought hang on that's an SSD. What on earth is making the noise? Putting my ear to the Mini it sounds a cross between hard drive chatter and electrical noise.

Turn up your volume. I made this by placing the phone on top of the Mini and recording. (Took a pic of the mini just to add a background to make it a video).

 
whitedragon101 said:
I have just opened my new Mac mini and I have noticed it making a strange noise. Its not very loud and sounds like hard drive chatter. But then I paused and thought hang on that's an SSD. What on earth is making the noise? Putting my ear to the Mini it sounds a cross between hard drive chatter and electrical noise.

Turn up your volume. I made this by placing the phone on top of the Mini and recording. (Took a pic of the mini just to add a background to make it a video).

Click to expand...
unbeliveble noice ! Mine is very quiet , I cant hear anything from it
 
Could be the fan scraping something? Or static from the internal speaker? It's difficult to tell. Does it slow down when you shutdown or does it just abruptly stop upon shutdown? 2018 Macmini should be dead quiet for the most part. My external HDD's are louder.
 
That sounds like coil whine. If you cannot hear it at normal seating distance, then don’t worry about it. All of them make that sound. Some are apparently louder than others, so you will need to determine if this is so bad that you cannot live with it.
 
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Radio static, on the AM band, on a thundery summer's evening.
That's not a whine. It's far too static noise like to merit the name.
 
WilliamG said:
That sounds like coil whine. If you cannot hear it at normal seating distance, then don’t worry about it. All of them make that sound. Some are apparently louder than others, so you will need to determine if this is so bad that you cannot live with it.
Click to expand...

WilliamG said:
It’s absolutely coil whine. That static sound is coil whine.
Click to expand...

Thanks guys. coil whine was my best guess too. I will see how it goes. If it is too much I may see if Apple will swap it or maybe just put it in a cupboard and run the cables to the desk.
 
whitedragon101 said:
I have just opened my new Mac mini and I have noticed it making a strange noise. Its not very loud and sounds like hard drive chatter. But then I paused and thought hang on that's an SSD. What on earth is making the noise? Putting my ear to the Mini it sounds a cross between hard drive chatter and electrical noise.

Turn up your volume. I made this by placing the phone on top of the Mini and recording. (Took a pic of the mini just to add a background to make it a video).

Click to expand...

Coil Whine...
 
WilliamG said:
Coil whine is a very specific technology occurrence.
Click to expand...
Sure, and that video sounds like a worn bushing in a computer fan.
Coil whine is that high squeal you hear when the flyback transformer on your CRT isn't potted together well enough.
Coil Whine video
It's a wave form, not a staticy sound.
You can do an FFT on it and figure the main frequency.
The static I've heard here sounds like it has a Poisson distribution of square waves, like some forms of static.
If the meaning has changed in the industry to include stuff like that as "whine" so be it, but it's darn hard to get frequency info from it.
 
Last edited:
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Synchro3 said:
It's the SSD, here another example:


Some components on SSD's board like ceramic capacitors, inductors produce high pitch whine or chirping noise. It's normal.
Click to expand...

Bingo thanks. That's it exactly.

It was doing loads of writes for setup and seems to have calmed down now. Really bizarre that an SSD makes an almost identical sound to HDD chatter for a totally different reason.
 
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They're buying their capacitors from North Korea now?
That's not a happy sound. I wonder what the mean time before failure is.
 
Looking at the comments in the youtube link it seems a widespread issue, including MacBook Pro's and PC laptops. Seems not to affect longevity.

However, not all SSD's make that noise, depending on the model. My Mac Mini 2018 is silent so far.
 
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These can't be either high voltage or high current capacitors, so the gods may be kind.
 
Interestingly the noise seems to have gone away.

This could be due to the fact that the system is now not moving tens of gigabytes as it was when I was setting it up so either :

a) The sound does happen but only under heavy drive use and doesn't happen in day to day use.
b) The sound disappears after a couple of days bedding in possibly due to heating the system up.
 
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whitedragon101 said:
Interestingly the noise seems to have gone away.

This could be due to the fact that the system is now not moving tens of gigabytes as it was when I was setting it up so either :

a) The sound does happen but only under heavy drive use and doesn't happen in day to day use.
b) The sound disappears after a couple of days bedding in possibly due to heating the system up.
Click to expand...
This is my experience too. I only heard it when first setting up and syncing Dropbox for the first time. (>400GB of data)
 
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