[chrissss]

Hi
just had a bigger hard drive put in my imac g5 from an apple reseller and it seems a bit noisy, audible clicking sounds, the old drive was pretty much silent, does this mean i might have a dodgy drive? even if its not dodgy its quite annoying do you think i am in my rights to ask for another one, or am i being a worry some wanker.

cheers

chris

[Waragainstsleep]

Tough one without hearing it. Bigger drives do tend to be slightly louder, but clicking always concerns me. It will have a warranty of course, and clicking which is due a mechanical fault will tend to get louder with time. Just make sure you back up if you choose to leave it. Or anyway for that matter.

If the clicking is low pitched and fairly quiet, and could almost be described as a crunching or grinding noise, I wouldn't worry. This kind of noise should increase under heavy drive activity. Listen to it while the machine boots up. It should be fairly crunchy/clicky until a number of seconds after your desktop finishes loading or the login window appears, depending on your settings.

Anything remotely loud would cause me concern, especially if its not in time with drive activity as described above. If it clicks fast when the drive is idle, that is also a bad sign.

Use Disk Utility to check for signs of impending doom. Run verify often and if you are getting errors that recurr after you fix them, or errors you cannot fix, take it back. Use Diskwarrior too if you have it.

[chrissss]

Thanks mate
I used disk utility to 'verify the drive' and it always come up with

Invalid record count
The volume iMac HD needs to be repaired

1 hfs volume checked
volume needs repair

[chrissss]

heres a grab from disk utility

[zerostar]

I would have it exchanged, especially if you don't have it all loaded up with your stuff/settings already.

[Waragainstsleep]

I would boot from CD then run Disk Repair. If it fails to repair, take it back. If it succeeds (verify again immediately), then keep verifying regularly and if it fails again soon, take it back anyway.

[Waragainstsleep]

Actually, underlying task failures are not a good sign. I said it before, but I'll say it again: Back up now if you have anything of value.

[chrissss]

Thanks all for your advise, The apple reseller who fitted the hard drive has agreed to replace it, but the strange thing, and quite annoying thing is they keep saying they cant find anything wrong with it apparently they cant even hear the clicking sounds, now ive found out none of my print services work, oh well just hope it works out ok in the end

cheers

chris

[DrBoar]

clicking is mechanical so orientation of the harddrive could affect this quite a lot. Even in the same orientation the sound level would be affected by how it attached, resonances could enhance the sound and resisitive losses could attenuate it.