Help with iMac Noises...

[knoxtown]

Hey everyone! I have a quick question. The last few days (when waking my imac from sleep) I get this loud noise from the computer. It usually lasts for a few minutes, and eventually goes silent. I think it's the fan, but wanted to get some input from you guys first. Below is a link to a youtube file (recorded some audio on my iphone)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iwN5l9e5vI

If it is the fan, do you think it just needs a clean or something? I'm replacing this imac when the new one comes out, so probably won't spend alot of money. However, it would be nice to get this noise stopped!

Thanks for the help.

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

Maybe the fan... weird sound though.

By chance, do you have an optical disc inside the drive? Sounds similar to an off-balence disc.

To determine the fans as the culprit - get SMC Fan Control - and manually turn your fans up and down one at a time - that noise should shift in frequency with the bad unit. That will determine if it's your fan or not, and isolate which one - so you could easily grab a replacement from iFixit or Ebay.

If it's the fan - it's likely a bad bearing - cleaning "may" help it out - but not likely. Increasing the fan speed a little higher may also help - but will be a short term solution.

What year / model iMac is it?

 

[knoxtown]

Thanks for the reply!

Its a Intel Core Two Duo 20inch - 2007 or 2008 i think.

I actually removed the optical drive a few months ago, bc I had gone bad. Doesn't sound like a hard drive though right?

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

You can isolate things by removing any disc within the optical drive - it should not make any noise when there is no media to be read.

Then you can tweak the fans with SMC to rule those out.

After that - the only other moving part would be your hard drive. However that sound does not seem like a bad HDD - as they spin pretty fast. And that level of vibration would almost certainly be alongside serious performance problems. I have heard drives that were not secure in their mounts - or had bad vibration dampeners make a similar sound when they chattered against the chassis. By chance did you remove the HDD when you swapped the optical drive?

 

[AndyCarolan]

Fan, most likely... If it were the HDD making that noise, you wouldn't be getting any data off it at all!

 

[knoxtown]

Thanks to both of you!

I did swap harddrives at one point...maybe I didn't screw it down enough...?

Either way, Ill probably take it apart and double check everything to make sure nothing is loose.

I'll give the SMC a try too!