iMac 2011 Hard Drive click after sleep, restart, or shut down

Hello everyone. I purchased an iMac in August last year. Everything seemed perfect until I noticed a click noise as the iMac went to sleep mode. It also did it after a restart or shut down (can't recall if it was doing it the first couple of days). I called Apple technical support and they walked me through some process to help me fix the issue. Nothing worked so they told me to take the iMac to a my nearest Apple store because the iMac wasn't supposed to make any noise.I took it to the genius bar where they did a hardware check and everything was ok. They even kept it for a week and said everything was normal. I took it home and the same thing happened so I wondered if it is just normal. Lately the back of the iMac will click every two minutes or so after going into sleep mode. I really don't think this is normal behavior.

Does anybody else has this problem? If it is normal then I guess i could get used to it, but the fact that there might be something wrong with my hard drive really makes it hard to ignore.

Which iMac do you have? The 2011 27" iMac models came standard with 1 TB Seagate hard drives of which some were recalled by Apple and replaced. The clicking during sleep is not normal. When the drive sleeps, the heads are not in motion. Contact Apple again and make an appointment to possibly have that drive changed out. Since you didn't tell us anything about which iMac you have I don't know if yours fits the recall.

I have a late 2011 27" iMac and my HDD makes a click on sleep or shutdown (just as the screen goes dark and it switches off).
I think it's just the HDD read/write heads parking and nothing to worry about

I believe I have read before that the seagate iMacs recalled where shipped between may and july 2011. Mine was a custom built shipped by late august. I already took it once and they said everything was fine according to their diagnosis. Do you think i should still try and change it? seems like OneSmallStep is on the same boat as i am though...

You can check the HDD recall status on Apples home page support. Just enter your serial number and it'll tell you if yours is part of the recall.
I honestly think you have nothing to worry about.

Double Post

FWIW, I have a buffalo 500GB drive conected to my iMac permanently as a backup drive and when the computer goes to sleep/shutdown it makes said "Click" sound but the comp HD does not.

Have you got an external drive connected? (it might be that making the click sound).

Just a thought.

Steve Austin said:

FWIW, I have a buffalo 500GB drive conected to my iMac permanently as a backup drive and when the computer goes to sleep/shutdown it makes said "Click" sound but the comp HD does not.

Have you got an external drive connected? (it might be that making the click sound).

Just a thought.

Click to expand...

A good thought! I too have an external Segate HDD plugged into the back of my iMac dedicated to backup that I'd forgotten about :Blushing: I think it's this that's making the click when on turn off or sleep.

OneSmallStep said:

I too have an external Segate HDD plugged into the back of my iMac dedicated to backup that I'd forgotten about

Click to expand...

Me too . Mines well out of the way, Was only reminded about it when I read this thread.

Cheers!.