iMac Hard Drive spins down/up continiously

[captkirkmtl]

Hi everyone,

My iMac hard-drive always spins down and then spins-up, whenever theirs a major disk access. I have also disabled the Energy Saver option of Spinning down the HDD.

Everytime i run the Disk Utility First Aid, the hdd always spins down and up continuously until the First Aid crashes.

Any Suggestions as to the reasons? Is this a failing Hard Drive ? Or can this be a failing Power Supply or Logic Board ?

 

[AppleNewton]

could be a failing drive.
Try booting from an external drive with a copy of the OS whether its a clone or just a blank install see ifthat drive does it and you can also run Disk Utilityon the internal drive to verify if it continues to do that even when booted from the external drive. If the external doesnt constantly spin up or down i wouldnt consider it a logic board issue...but more like an internal drive issue.

You can even run diagnostics/disk utility form the restore disks that came with your system or retail copy of OSX.

 

[captkirkmtl]

could be a failing drive.
Try booting from an external drive with a copy of the OS whether its a clone or just a blank install see ifthat drive does it and you can also run Disk Utilityon the internal drive to verify if it continues to do that even when booted from the external drive. If the external doesnt constantly spin up or down i wouldnt consider it a logic board issue...but more like an internal drive issue.

You can even run diagnostics/disk utility form the restore disks that came with your system or retail copy of OSX.

I'll give it a shot. Thanks

 

[CubeHacker]

Can you use system profiler to give us the exact make and model of the hard drive? There are some newer "green" drives that tend to spin down during times of inactivity without any OS intervention, to save energy. If you do a search for the model number online, you should be able to tell if the drive you have is one such drive.

If not, it is quite possible that it is failing.