IMac HDD deaths
Ok folks, my first ever post here, so bear with me
Here are my personal experiences with hdd's that die in an iMac. I hope some of the info I gathered during these issues might be useful for others, so here goes:
My Imac ate hdd's too. After the third hdd died (and I initially spent money on pricey repairs -after some dumb discussions at a local Apple reseller here, denying to give me decent service-), I decided to open up my silver friend myself.
Although the Apple reseller had tried to frighten me with all kinds of doom-scenarios, like: "you shouldn't open it up yourself: the glass plate or its plastic connectors will probably break", "you can only open it up in a special dust free environment" and more bs like that, it was a piece of cake and only took me about 30 minutes to replace the hdd myself.
The glass in front of the screen is -quite brilliantly- connected with magnets and can be removed easily with a suction cup. The rest is pretty straightforward, as long as you are careful and take it easy (Youtube has some great videos on it as a guide). Some experience repairing systems of course helps.
After opening the machine up it seemed the official Apple Service provider that performed the previous repairs to my iMac (both in and outside warranty), did a pretty lousy job. The thermostat that's originally connected to the hdd (for the 2008 aluminum iMac's; apparently that was changed in the 2009 series) with a piece of spongy material that's adhesive on one side, was barely hanging on there with a tiny piece of transparent adhesive tape, preventing the thermostat itself from making direct contact with the hdd's heat sink
After sticking the new hdd in, connecting the thermostat properly, cleaning the system out a bit and putting it back together again; all worked smoothly. Formatted the hdd, restored a TimeMachine backup, updated
etc..
Then I installed the free application called SMCFanControl to be able to monitor the hdd temperature, since I felt my iMac eating hdd's might have something to do with the hdd temperature. Now I am not an expert, but judging from information available here and there it seemed hdd's just don't like temperatures above 42 degrees Celsius more or less. Can't blame em: a hot summer with temperatures above that wears me out too
When my iMac was running again I noticed the hdd temperature went over 50 fast, when using certain software. Although Photoshop for instance didn't increase the heat terribly, SecondLife did. I messed around with the different fanspeeds in SMCFanControl (for HDD and ODD mostly); it still seemed hard to make it run cool (mind you: room temperature of about 16 degrees only: no heat emitting objects near). I decided to run SecondLife app and it's disk-cache from a USB stick to prevent continuous hdd usage (I know: shouldn't be this way). This, in combination with increasing the fan speeds with SMCFanControl did the trick: and the hdd temperature was well within bandwidth.
When timemachine makes a full backup, I have to switch the fan speeds to maximum to keep the hdd temperature at about 39 degrees.
I also noticed my machine does check the temperature correctly for it's fans, but there is no significant audible increase in fanspeeds when the temperature increases (any feedback from you guys on this would be very welcome).
So far, so good, system is running and keeps running normally now. I really believe the iMac hdd issue has something to do with the temperature the hdd reaches, especially with heavy users, possibly due to the thermostat's operation, fan speeds with certain temperatures, differences in heat sinks of different types of hdd's (where the 08's model's thermostat is stuck onto) and possibly even the very compact way an iMac is designed in (disabling the system from getting rid of heat efficiently).
I will keep this forum updated if something happens
Best regards and good luck
