I cant believe there are no comments on this. I was just looking at this $50 price tag and I as an engineer realizing that this cable is probably just a temp sensor controlling a variable resistance to control fan speed. It should be possible to just shunt the wire and keep the fan off or soldier in a resistor to keep the fan speed at half speed. Thats what prompted me to look around and find this video. Nice work putting this together. Thanks for saving me $50
Amazing, I've been watching tons of videos on this in preparation to upgrade my iMac and there was just something about the solutions that didn't make sense. This OWC "sensor" is attached with double sided tape which has insulative properties, which would defeat the purpose of the "sensor". For this "sensor" to make sense it would need to be part of the HDD or attached with thermal past like a processor. Currently in Canada, this OWC wire is also nearly the same price as a good 1TB SSD!!! This video just put all the pieces together to help understand what is going on, not that it is surprising that Apple or any other large corporation would do something like this, but still mind blowing none-the-less. Thank you so much; should more videos like this on RU-vid instead of the marketing garbage that is ruining this media.
All of those dislikes come from OWC. Thanks for the informative video buddy. I installed SSD Fan Control and saved 50 bucks by not buying that useless cable.
Did you use Y splitter? Which Y SATA splitter did you use? The SATA Y splitter with 5 wires (yellow black red black orange) like in the picture in the video or the SATA Y splitter with 4 wires (yellow black red black) that is easily available in the market?
Just adding an overdue comment to thank you for this video - last year I ordered a '15 pin male to 2 SATA female power splitter Y cable' and used it to upgrade the HDD of my mid-2011 21.5 inch iMac to an SSD. It worked flawlessly immediately with no odd fan behaviour! At the same time I used an iMac hard drive ribbon cable and right angled SATA data cable to add a second SSD to the spare hard drive ports on the logic board, so now I have a dual SSD configuration while keeping the Optical Drive fully functional. Thanks again and good luck to everyone with this cheap (~$5 cables) upgrade!
Thank you very much for the video. A question please: there are 2 SATA Y splitters in the market, which one to use? There is a SATA Y splitter that has 4 wires (yellow black red black) and there is a SATA Y splitter that has 5 wires (yellow black red black orange). Do I have to specifically use the 5 wires SATA Y splitter (as I can see in the picture in the video) or the 4 wire SATA Y splitter will also do the job? Thank you in advance.
I was literally about to purchase the whole OWC ssd upgrade kit and stumbled on your video while trying to understand the specifics of the sensor wire which didn’t add up, glad I found this. Do you have alternative recommendations on a cheaper but reliable “whole kit” solution vs the OWC one?
I had my suspicions about this "sensor" after I heard that the newer models of iMacs no longer use the hard drive as a temp controller and OWC was still selling this cable. Sure enough I replaced my fusion drive with a SATA SSD just using the existing cable. I never had any issues. None.
I have a Mid 2010 A1311 EMC2389. Installed an SSD and dosdude1's Catalina patched OS X. The fans don't rev up immediately. It's a slow progression after turning it on. After about 10 to 15 minutes a fan will be very loud and probably at max. I had a 4x power splitter cable laying around, it's not a Y, but has 5 wires and gives you 4 power connectors from one. This one doesn't seem to make a difference. The fan eventually revs up to full just like without the splitter. So either my patched Catalina fan system doesn't work, or this particular cable doesn't work, it's a PYO4SATA cable. EDIT: My original power cable only has 4 wires. Plus I also have a 3rd cable that went to my HDD, Apple part# 593-0998, a temperature sensor cable. I wonder if I short these wires if that would work for me? EDIT2: Confirmed! I cut a small paperclip and bent it into the holes of the 593-0998 sensor cable. It worked the same! If we only knew 11 years ago that just shorting those wires would have put OWC out of business.
If I upgrade to the same brand as the original hard drive (but not same model). Will I avoid the issue with the thermal sensor cable/fan running constantly?
Can you share your experience with me please? Which Y SATA splitter did you use? The SATA Y splitter with 5 wires (yellow black red black orange) like in the picture in the video or the SATA Y splitter with 4 wires (yellow black red black) that is easily available in the market?
I had a problem while doing this upgrade and I had to do an intensive research to fix it, so I post this comment in hope that it helps others. First of all, this trick works great (also with 4 wires SATA Y Splitter), and you won't have to install any software to control fans speeds. Everything will be fine. However, my problem was that after I reassembled my 21,5" mid 2011 iMac, CPU and ODD fans went crazy. I ran Apple Hardware Test, and it showed an issue with the LCD temperature sensor - 4ns/1/C0000008: TL0p--124 - To solve it you have to take off the LCD, disconnect all the connectors, tear off tapes on the upper-left side on the back of the LCD and disconnect LCD thermal sensor cable (it's the one with 6 wires in the middle of LCD) connector. Blow some canned air over it and reconnect. Put your iMac together, reset NVRAM and everything should work just fine, assuming that all your cables are intact. AHT will show no troubles.
Actually sounds like your lcd sensor was messed up before and you have to use fan control software.. Why you ask it turns on the fan to cool your hard drives. Without it your baking your drive
@@johnDingoFoxVelocity You misunderstood my whole comment. LCD temp sensor is not and never was messed up. Problem was in LCD thermal sensor cable connector. For some reason, there was no signal. I had to disconnect this cable completely, clean it and reconnect. It works now. AHT shows everything is fine, fans are working properly and nothing is baking. And I do not have to use any software. The whole point of using Y splitter instead of OWC cable is that it works without any fan control software.
no you need the fan control software because it actually turns off the hard drive fan in the center of the imac not the cpu fan not the gpu fan the hard drive cooling fan doesnt come on at all the y cable shuts it off
I'm confused, as my late 2013 i7 has only one fan -- the squirrel cage. It also developed diagonal video malfunction the night I put in the Hyundai SSD. The fan hadn't varied in speed from before. Might have just been coincidence, as 11 years is pretty old for consumer electronics.
Thank you so much for this informative video, I was just about to crack open the wallet and spend $65 on the OWC wire. I have a Late 2009 Imac and was wondering if the Sata Power Y splitter cable would world with it?
I upgraded my 24 iMac with an SSD are use the cable and the fans came on full blast, I had to use software to control the fans in the end I took the cable out didn’t seem like it was doing the thing and the fans don’t come on fully!
I've installed an SSD with the OWC cable and it did not solve the loud fan problem. Are you saying if I purchase a SATA Y cable and make the mod myself. This will stop my fans from being loud and I can bin the OWC cable?
Thanks a bunch, champ! I normally replace the HDD temp cable with a 2N3904 diode when upgrading older iMac’s to SSD. But I was baffled by an 2011 21.5” that came simply without sensor cable. Tried just putting in the SSD. Fans went crazy. Found this video in 2 min. Cut off one side of a Y-sata splitter I had lying around and fit it in. Problem solved! THANKS. 👍🏽
You mentioned older macs. I have a 2009 27". The drive (mechanical) is connected to the board via the standard SATA Power cable, but there are two additional wires which plug into a 4 pin connector with only 2 pins being used and the other end plugs into the logic board. If I short these two wires which plug into the drive, would this achieve the same result? I saw another video in which someone removed the connector at the drive end and attached this diode you mentioned, and then plugged it into the board which slowed the fans down...Is this what you were talking about? Thanks
Can you please clarify? I want to replace the HD with an SSD. I have Y splitter SATA cable. Why do we "cut off one side"? Just to get it out of the way?
The little board is not just a temperature sensor, it also has a controller on it. So it measures SSD temperature and reports it back to iMac's logic board. This makes SSD temperature accessible via various tools (such as istats), and allows the fan speed to increase if SSD overheats. If we want all temperature monitoring to work as it was before OWC's solution makes sense. However, one may argue that these days SSDs do not overheat much and this is not required. Shorting the cables instead of using the sensor board causes a permanently low reported temperature. So even when the SSD is overheated this does not get reported back to the logic board and fan speed stays the same. In an extreme case, this may result in the SSD failing due to high temperature, but I guess before that happens other sensors in the vicinity of the SSD can pick up the increasing temperature and increase the fan speed. It is a decision everyone should make on their own, if I was upgrading a customer's device, I wouldn't want to disable temperature monitoring, if it was my own iMac I would possibly take the cheap route. PS: I am not affiliated with OWC.
That's why you use fan control software and the board on the 2011 doesn't give any sensor reading its the firmware on the drive that's controlling it and the board just emulates that firmware which isn't needed
A while back I added an SSD to my 2011 iMac, supplementing the HDD, which I left in place for storage. As predicted, the fans started spinning at full tilt. I installed the free version of an app called Macs Fan Control which works well enough, but only after I log in. Until then the fans are at 100. Today I finally got around to installing a y-splitter on the SSD, hoping it would sort out the fan issue but to my chagrin the fans are still going full blast (until Macs Fan Control kicks in). If you look at the SATA power connector pinout, there is one pin (pin 11) which can carry data, aside from that all the pins are spoken for. Do you have a link to the article by this hacker you speak of?
Because your machine has a faulty heat sensor on the cpu the fans don't come on at all with the splitter until you turn on Mac fan control if you are having them at full blast on startup with the adapter your fan sensors are damaged
@@johnDingoFoxVelocity I'm not sure I understand your response. Are you proposing two different scenarios? One with the fan sensor being damaged and one with the CPU sensor being damaged?
Thanks for this, but which wire do I have to cut and connect together? Is there a close up photo or something to guide us before I cut the wrong one :-) Thanks!
@@E.M.A_Techno My guess: It will be the extra 2 wires that would not be on a regular SATA Power Cable. The author of the video states at 9:27 that is "The first wire and the 4th wire". The other option is to get a SATA Power Y Splitter Cable Adapter.
I posted a link to this video on Apple Forums in a discussion on this upgrade topic and got this: "We removed your post "SSD to Replace original HDD in 27" iMac mid 2011 (12,2) model?" because it was speculative. We understand wanting to share experiences, but these forums are meant for technical questions that can be answered by the community.
The 2015 has a NVMe slot on the back of the logicboard (all iMacs after 2011 have an additional slot, either M.2 SATA or NVMe). It just requires a cheap adapter. I recommend using that slot, as the NVMe speed is much higher than SATA. Also with this solution you can leave the old hard drive inside for additional storage.
The 2012 iMac has a M.2 SATA slot on the back of the logicboard (after 2012 it was even the much faster NVMe). It just requires a cheap adapter. I recommend using that slot, with this solution you can leave the original hard drive inside for additional storage. But it will be more work removing the logicboard to access its back.
PURE GENIUS! THE NOW $3. CABLE WORKS "PERFECTLY" NO NEED AT ALL TO BUY THE $50. CABLE AT ALL. MY 2011 IMAC WORKS PERFECT WITH A $3. CABLE. MAKE SURE YOU GET THE ONE THAT'S ANGLED TO FIT INSIDE THE IMAC. APPLE SHOULD BE SUED FOR DOING THAT CRAP TO THE PUBLIC. IT'S ALL ABOUT MONEY, MAKING THE PUBLIC GO TO THEM TO UPGRADE A HARD DRIVE??
It actually applies to several models and it's not really a sensor it's just a chip that basically tells the power supply that you're using an official hard drive that's supported which is really stupid because they don't make half of the hard drives that these machines take anymore so basically you can bypass it use fan control software and you don't need to pay $80 for a stupid cable
So you're saying that, I can slap the SSD in there, and resolve the subsequent fan problems (ie spinning at top speed) afterwards using just fan control software? Cause I've got an SSD that I really just wanna throw in there right now, but I'm not sure if I've gotta get all these extra stuff ( even if they are cheap) or if I've gotta do any mods to the wiring.
No the sensor doesn’t detect anything all it is is a bogus circuit board that bypasses the Apple internal sensor on a stock Apple hard drive so basically it’s garbage it’s a lie to get you to buy a circuit board instead of just buying a splitter and solving a problem that way
Thanks!!! So crazy but not surprising. Apple is pure evil and I hope someday people stop purchasing their products. I was donated this old iMac with a bad hard drive so I wanted to fix it up to give it away. Ran into this annoying issue and I could not imagine spending $50 on this seemingly simple looking cable. Especially this old. The computer is barely worth $50.
Hi John, I just tried this solution today having replaced the original HDD in my mid 2011 21.5" iMac, however the results were not as expected, and thought the following info may be of some interest to your viewers. I initially just cut the two wires in positions 1 & 4 and ran up the iMac and found all was good for the first 10 minutes or so. Then, the HDD fan started ramping up and within a couple of minutes was screaming at full speed. I switched off the iMac and went back inside, and joined the wires (as as per picture) as suggested by one of your subscribers, but the result was the same where after a few minutes the HDD fan ramped up to full speed. Now I didn't have one of those by-pass cables to hand try, so went down the software route to control the fan speed(s) and downloaded the free Macs Fan Control software from Macupdate.com. I have left the CPU and ODD fans on auto, and input custom settings for the new SSD, so that this fan runs at 1100rpm until the ambient temperature reaches 25 degrees celsius and would increase speed incrementally after that. Anyway, if you're saving 50 bucks, or £35-45 here in UK it's a win in my book! Thanks for the interesting post, which without it, would have caused me to open my wallet, and needlessly part with some hard-earned!👍
