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Thoughts on modding a iMac 2010 27" to deaden HD vibration/sounds.

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Thoughts on modding an iMac 2010 27" to deaden HD vibration/sounds.

iMacs are, on paper and most often in the flesh, usually quiet (for those familiar with the problem, skip my long preamble and read beneath the dotted line). I am not having a go at Apple, of whom I remain a big fan; it might have taken them a while but they have in part addressed/resolved the issue for some users whose models contained Seagate SP25 revision 1TB drives.

Unfortunately, a relatively sizeable minority, using Seagate or other makes of hard drive, are not quiet and unless you have heard the problem, you would be forgiven for thinking the noise is liveable with. I want to come up with a construction mod for those that aren't quiet/for people stuck with noisy hard drives. In this case, the 2010 27" 'Seagate' model. I know, there was a product recall on certain Seagate 1tb hard drives that make iMacs sound like a bass-rumble coffee percolator, bloop-bloop-blooping away and I have one of those SP25 revision Seagates but... I don't want to send the iMac in to be serviced; I don't want dings in the aluminium/scratches, which too many users have reported, and I was going to upgrade the hard drive, fit an SSD and USB3.0 card to the mini PCIE, anyway. What has struck me is reading how noisy even replacement drives can be with this 2010 model. It seems to be luck of the draw how quiet your sample is. There are endless forum threads about it. Again, unless you have heard the weird bass-rumble, you won't know how unsettling it is.

As my 2010 Seagate-iMac model will have the proprietary Seagate temperature sensor cable, I am going to have to fit a Seagate hard drive. As I understand it, before, it was thought the hard drive would have to be firmware flashed by Apple or the cooling fans would permanently spin at full speed, but apparently some people, when upgrading, were plugging this temperature cable back in the wrong way up. The drive I am looking at is a 2TB Seagate and not notably quiet, compared to the 3GB model which has patchy reliability reviews and which is more than I want to spend on this upgrade. So -

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Looking at pictures of the iMac's internals, it appears that the 2010 iMac's hard drive is held in by an upper relatively thin aluminium rail with silicone grommet mounts for the screws, while the lower part of the HD is secured by Silicone plugs. I am not sure if there are silicone grommets mounting that rail, and so on, to the iMac's shell but imagine so. Where with my desktop computers, I make a cats cradle suspension out of silicone (cut from £1 silicone backing trays) to reduce HD noise, there is of course no room in the imac to do that.


I am very much open to suggestions. At the moment, here are my thoughts.

1) Accepting that some larger capacity hard drives are noisier than others, try and establish how much of the secondary 'blame' can be laid on the relatively thin and presumably resonant-ish aluminium hard drive fixing rail, or is it what that rail interfaces to in the iMac that is the problem. What part or parts are causing the iMac's shell to act as a resonating chamber? Are there material differences in the 2011/2012 model's mounting? There are youtube sound samples of the bass crump-crump sound, it's very distinct and unsettling as from the usual quiet HD chatter. Should I add decoupling silicone washers there, if there aren't any, and if room? Or should I prefabricate replacement fixture parts that are acoustically dead - i.e. get a piece/pieces of scrap steel of similar thickness, saw them, file, drill? Has anyone gone that route? I don't intend to make any new holes in the case.

2) In that my iMac seems to run on the hot side and I like quiet, encasing the hard drive in a factory-made HD vibration/sound killer case, if there was even room to do so, doesn't seem like a good idea; I would dearly love to fit some more expensive/better fans but that would ruin the look of the beautiful case.

3) I would like to fit sound deadening, as some people fit to car doors, but I read that it significantly adds to the weight of anything that it is applied to, which would make the already reasurringly-heavy iMac a bit too heavy and I would think it would make airflow even worse.

4) Fit a lower spec laptop drive which I could suspend from a cradle of silicone threads. Though I am tempted to do that, and appreciate that some spin at 7,200rpm, I would much prefer to fit a more durable 7,200 desktop drive. I am open to the idea of fitting a green/5,900rpm drive, especially if it is cool running and in that I also want to fit a 128GB SSD. My preference, though, is a 7,200rpm model. I use bootcamp and there is only finite space on a cheap 128GB SSD.

I think my best bet might be to prefabricate parts, or at least that is what I am going to try. That upper aluminium rail, for instance, could be made thicker (if repalcing it with something 3x thicker isn't going to effect air flow?), there's even room to strap a length of steel to that rail with thin cable tidies. As you can see from the picture, Apple have gone to some lengths to dampen the vibrations/sound with silicone grommets/plugs/washers and I appreciate that anything that I might try will make only a small difference, beyond obviously replacing/upgrading the SP25 revision Seagate 1TB and hoping I do well in the noise lottery, but I am open to suggestions beyond that, even for small differences.

I can't take credit for the picture, found on ifixit.
 

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Sorry it took me so long to get back, I had some time over the Christmas break. Long story short, I fitted a 2TB Seagate hard drive - details in post 3 - and silicone washers and I now have a silent iMac, when not under full load, as it should be.

I am considering making a tutorial but what I want to do, here, is save some users time by covering things rarely mentioned elsewhere that drove other iMac DIYers to a despair equal to the despair caused by their abnormally bass-loud rumble hard drive iMacs! Call it simple prep work. I am avoiding, for now, posting Youtube links because no one single video, on its own, covered all of the things I found in my iMac, including a surprise that could have been expensive. Though the person who made one of the best deconstruction videos might just have neglected to mention something that they'd dealt with in an earlier opening and then forgotten about, the ribbon cable that he removed by just unclasping a clip was, in my iMac, soft glued to a strut; his cable came away instantly where mine wouldn't budge, then I felt along its length and found it was soft glued to that strut. I had to very carefully peel the cable away to then carefully unclasp it, which could have been a disaster. More on that in a bit. Watch as many of the most popular videos as you can and, if possible, have a camera film what you are doing or take still shots.

First, a constructive disclaimer - your iMac is an expensive item and this task is not for the risk averse or for people who are impatient/easily agitated. The Youtube videos will give you a good idea of how involved a process it is but like most repair/mod videos they don't have usually bloop reels/show common pitfalls.

Search on Youtube for how to fit a hard drive or SSD drive to a 2010 27" iMac. Though I am a trained AV tech, there is no soldering here, just neccessary care in disassembly because, compared to a PC build, working on an iMac is uncharted territory and, as with laptops, there are a few cables/ribbon cables to be especially cautious around. The rest is methodology, patience, care with screws, being gentle when positioning/repositioning logic boards.

Repair/upgrade bugbears. It seems obvious that you need a relatively dust free environment to keep dust from being sandwiched between glass and screen proper but dust and difficult-to-remove fingerprints are frequently raged about in iMac repair stores that I read. I use a cleaned out bathroom where the shower has been run and the condensation has cleared; don't take your iMac in there until the room is basically dry. Food preparation gloves help prevent grease. No harm covering your hair. I have read horror stories with people accidentally marking the screen with the tip of a vacuum cleaner nozzle accidentally making contact while held above it. Compressed air cans are great but not cheap. Have a swear jar handy if you didn't prep a room.

You will need a couple of suction cups to remove the front glass, please watch the videos for the how, though that part took me seconds and I as I already had bathroom sink plunger suction cups that I cleaned, no cost. You might know someone who has these. Place the screen somewhere safe.

There are 8 Torx T10 screws holding the screen in place, four each side. For now, remove three from each side and place in marked jars. You will then need a Torx T10 screwdriver (I will post a picture of the one I used; it needs to have a narrow-ish shaft to work within a fairly slim channel; a socket set shaft didn't fit for me). A good pair of tweezers is a help in stopping the screws from going astray. Usually I would be using a magnetised T10 screwdriver so that screw's head would stick to it (rub the strong Samarium–cobalt magnet of a pair of cheapo broken headphones, if unrepairablel) but it proved less helpful, here, because the screen glass' magnets are more powerful than you would expect from watching the videos. I used an old washing up glove, made a small hole, slotted the screw thread through, got the thread in place on the hole, screwed a bit, snapped off the rubber glove, tightened. It sounds daft but that way a screw that you're trying to get into a slightly awkward space will never get away from you, takes two seconds. Before that, I had one screw go astray and carefully retrieved it from a cranny with a magnetised screwdriver.

With your screen held in place by a couple of screws, from here on, before you remove the remaining screws, follow the video tutorials carefully. If you have someone to hold the edges of the screen while you carefully remove the cables as instructed in the videos, that's a help. I managed but would have welcomed it.

The Youtube video that I used most, links back to a retailer for the retailers own-brand SSD drive, a retailer that isn't tonymacx86's preferred Amazon/newegg, so out of respect I haven't linked to it, here, but it is one of the more watched/methodical videos on how to fit an SSD. Again, though, their iMac sample either never had a partly glued down ribbon cable, or they'd peeled it off in an earlier dissassembly and forgotten or my iMac is subtlety different from theirs. At the time, it took me a minute to figure out I was in uncharted territory, that, in my case, releasing the clasp didn't release the ribbon cable. I finally felt along its length and found it was soft glued to a strut. I gently peeled it away enough that I could release the clasp but it didn't peel away cleanly... Fortunately everything worked when i powered up, no breaks in the ribbon cable's traces. Again, as is copiously stated elsewhere, you want to be careful with the cables that you need to detach when you gently prize away the screen, without touching the screen's surface.
 
Along with a replacement hard drive, I used £1 silicone baking trays from the £ store to make silicone washers, I already had these trays (great for making a cats cradle of silicone bands to quieten noisy hard drives in thin PC cases). You can buy proper silicone washers, which are softer/spongier, but I found there is only a little wriggle room to fit them in the hard drive mooting bay of the 2010 27" iMac. Because those washers don't fully decouple the hard drive from the mounting rod which attaches to the iMac shell via plastic standoffs, in the way that some silicone-decoupled hard drive mounting kits in PC do, all you are doing is dampening the vibration down a tiny bit. What I want to do, at some point, is make a simple custom rod with over-large holes in it for silicon sleeve washers to pass through, greatly reducing the path for mechanical vibration transmission through to the iMac's shell. I will post photographs to show you what i mean. At the moment, unless I start using the iMac for crunching video, keeping the hard drive under constant heavy load, the 2TB hard drive as it stands is quiet enough as is.

I fitted a Seagate 2TB hard drive, specifically one that I extracted from a cheap Seagate STBV2000200 2TB Expansion USB 3.0 - I wanted a USB3.0 enclosure and it was a cheap way of getting both hard drive and enclosure. I have put the iMac's original 1TB Seagate inside it; it is relatively quiet in there but, in that it is technically recalled, I am not entrusting any important data to it or using it as a time machine drive). A few youtube videos out there imply you will damage the enclosure housing if you try and open it yourself. I used a few palate knives to gently prize it open and none of the clips/tabs broke. I also purchased a 3TB Seagate, the kind with the detachable base that you can fit Thunerbolt or Firewire to, but my particular sample isn't quiet. Luck of the draw but I expected the lower capacity drive to be quieter and it was.

I fitted an SSD drive, a Sandisk Extreme model (though this SSD drive is my primary boot drive, I should mention, re-noise, that I also installed OS X to the hard drive and booted from that; it is almost completely inaudible, as an iMac with a new hard drive ideally should be), SATA Y-power splitter cable (I made one but you can buy ready made) and a standard SATA cable (not one of the right angle ones; or at least there wasn't quite enough space for the one that I originally wanted to fit). I have always found that the the sticky backed pads suggested by some users to fit the SSD drive have a nasty habit of drying out when used in PC cases, so I instead bought some sticky backed velcro pads that came with a guarantee, of sorts. Again, I can put together a full list of parts with photographs if people would like. I might roll it up into a blog.

I appreciate what I have said would benefit from photographs, please consider this a long thumbnail sketch of the importance of watching more than one disassembly video. I don't want to put the determined off but I don't want someone to damage a ribbon cable, either. I will update with photogoraphs if people are interested. Again, meantime, if fitting a replacement/new hard drive, make sure you replace a Seagate with a Seagate, etc, so that the proprietary heat sensor cable/pins in your model fits the replacement drive (and note which way around that cable goes in or you might be afflicted with full fan speed).
 
I suppose in a sense the new 2TB hard drive has bedded in; it is a little louder than when I started out, though that is possibly because I was previously booting into the 2TB drive itself, to keep the test fair obviously, rather than booting into the silent SSD. Booting into the SSD, I do hear the new Seagate hard drive a little during OS X's background maintenance script, though the sound is less obnoxious/loud than it was, still very liveable with if not completely quiet. I will keep an eye on it. I will boot into the Seagate/OS next time and post again if noisy. I don't use this computer so often, now. I bought a 1.5meter Belkin mini displayport to mini displayport cable to use the iMac as a monitor screen with my mackintosh. Amazon was the cheapest I could find at around £13. I still plan to get a blog going with some thoughts and pictures on the silicone washers I made/fitted and what I would have gone back and done had the replacement hard drive been anywhere near as noisy.
 
An update that I would rather not be making. Though nowhere near as obnoxiously loud as the 1TB Seagate drive was, I can now hear the 2TB. It is the same kind of almost constant ruck-ruck-ruck-ruck-ruck-ruck-ruck-ruck background noise but less bass, so it is much less unsettling. To whatever degree the silicone grommets helped, I am working on a blog with photographs and thoughts on better decoupling the hard drive from its mounts.

At the moment, I am finding it hard to source the very soft rubber grommets that my Antec Sonata IV uses to decouple hard drives from the hard drive cage. I had thought they were soft silicone but if my searches are anything to go by, the seem to be a soft rubber. What I like about my silicone mods in years past on other computers is that the silicone doesn't perish/degrade from the dry heat. I would also have to fabricate a part out of metal for the iMac, the upper bar from which the hard drive is screwed to the iMac's shell. The idea being to give the give the hard drive a bit more room than it has, so allowing thicker gel-soft grommets, like the Antec ones, that better decouples the hard drive screws from the case. I also want to replace the two locator pins on the bottom of the hard drive with silicone or rubber ones. The ones that I tried to fashion out of silicone were okay but too soft and flexible to hold the hard drive in place solidly.

Plan B is to replace the screws and pins with silicone string, tying the hard drive into place, but it would be an inelegant mess. I don't want to structurally butcher any part of the iMac, just change out a metal bar for a custom one and fit thicker/very soft decoupling grommets.
 
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