Should I be concerned?

[GyroFX]

My mid 2010 27" iMac that I've had for 1.5yrs started making a grinding noise with the HD about a week ago. It would make a grinding noise between 3 to 5 seconds while I'm browsing on the internet many times in an hour. It's probably grinding during other processes as well. Sometimes the grinding causes the onscreen action to freeze or pause then return to normal when the grinding stops.

I've read some older threads about the grind and how people have changed their HDs to get rid or it or not. I'm just wondering if my HD is starting to fail? AHT checks out and smart status seems ok. I didn't get an extended apple warranty but I do have an extra year of warranty through AMEX. Just trying to figure out if is of major concern.

I have everything backed up on Time Machine and I also manually backup on a 2nd external 1 TB HD. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanx

 

[S.B.G]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yes, by your description it seems like your HDD is starting to die. S.M.A.R.T. never works and has never worded. It was a good idea but when it was develeoped, too many committiees were involved and they watered down it's effectiveness.

It's good that you have everything backed up. You have a few options here.

1. You can replaced the HDD yourself. ifixit.com has awesome step by step instructions, with photos, on how to do that.
2. Let your extended warranty cover it all.
3. If you have access to an IBM PC, take your HDD out and connect it to the IBM and get a copy of Spinrite from www.grc.com and run that. It's a HDD recovery and maintenance tool that works great. I use it all the time and recovered a voice logging server last week with it. It could prolong and/or fix that grinding noise.

 

[GyroFX]

thanx for the rec. is there such an HD tool for the Mac?

If I have a Bootcamp partition of Win7, can I boot into that to check?