Why does my new hard drive run so hot?!

[discofuel]

An authorized Apple service center replaced my internal stock 1TB drive in my late 2009 27" iMac with a western digital caviar black 2TB drive (and my optical drive with an SSD).

The SSD runs at around 49 degrees Celcius but my WD HDD runs so hot. I have to run my fans at 3700rpm to keep the temp at 58 degrees Celcius. I once forgot to set the fan speed and the HD went up to 66 degrees!

And as a result my hard drive fan makes my iMac really noisy, which isn't good for music production.

The original internal drive didn't run nearly as hot and my iMac was silent.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[macmastersam]

Wirelessly posted (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)

See if you can try and get a 2TB HD with 7200 RPM to replace the current one. That way the fans won't have So much strain @ 3700 RPM, so it will be more silent. I would suggest not using the iMac for no more than 2 1/2 hours at the most in one go. If you do, I would suggest leaving it for at least a half hour before using it. It would also help if you had some form of ventilation behind it, like a window or a couple of fans. See if you can operate the fans @ 4000 RPM when you replace the current HD with the faster one. Might also help a bit more as this could keep the mac cooler for a bit longer. But when you don't use it, ventilate it in anyway possible. I would also suggest even ventilating it even when the iMac is on, like I stated earlier.

In simple words, find as many ways as possible to keep your mac cool, essentially

 

[discofuel]

Thanks for replying to me but my HD is 7200RPM, it's the fan speeds that I have to run at 3700RPM.

I'm hoping someone can provide an answer as to why my new hard drive runs so much hotter than the stock internet drive it replaced, as they were both 7200RPM.

 

[gullySn0wCat]

60deg sounds too hot for even a performance drive like the Caviar Black. iMacs are notoriously hot, however so I would ask someone else who has the same drive. The one in my Mac Pro is half that (but has much better ventilation).

 

[dwarnecke11]

My WD Black regularly gets up to 55 or 56°C in normal usage. I'm a bit worried since I expect this iMac to last at least five years (15 months in now).

 

[derbothaus]

Those drives do run pretty hot. But it should not hit 66º. The tech could have bungled a thermal sensor. Average temp is 46ºC for a 2TB Black. So something is up as the coolest tested on same HW was not that cool at 36ºC. Not sure why Apple is using these drives. They are very fast and awesome, but in an iMac? They usually think things through a little more in regards to components.