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!