Hard drive upgrades restricted in Apple's new Thunderbolt iMacs

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  • Reply 101 of 105
    brucepbrucep Posts: 2,823member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by alienzed View Post


    I seriously doubt this will impact sales... 99.9% of iMac buyers wouldn't even consider changing the internal HD.



    bingo .

    buying a $2500. or so I-MAC and even dreaming about going inside off the bat is damn silly .

    Its a an elegant sweet machine. Much more powerful than imacs made 3 yrs ago for the same money .



    I don't get it .



    I took my 2 slow 80 g lap top drives and up graded to samsung triple 500 g drives .

    But that was after 3 yrs .





    RISKING a brand new machine ??







    (
  • Reply 102 of 105
    maxincukmaxincuk Posts: 11member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by OWC Larry View Post


    I posted the testing we did and there's been a lot of additional discussion of what's gojng on in general...

    http://blog.macsales.com/10206-furth...e-restrictions



    Hardmac reported that for Apple's SSD only configured iMacs Apple shorts the pin and ground at their connector side used for the thermal. This tells the iMac there is no HD in the bay and no thermal monitoring to be done. It doesn't impact the SATA port from operating.



    The Y-power splitters connected to the end intended for the HDD apparently ground/short same line with the same affect. That's why Apple AHT passes and why the fans aren't reving with the non-Apple drive... The detail is that you also added a 2nd drive and have that y-splitter in play with the unintended affect.



    So - it's a good idea to get a SMART monitoring application like iStat of HDD Fan Control if you have done this. While we're still looking into other solutions.. at the moment, without an app that can rev up the fans when your drive is under load and kicking up the heat - you could very well be allowing it to cook (or even other components near the bay) and have early failure. As this kind of option is a solution we're testing, still working on thresholds that will match up with normal Apple fan speed control or at least ones that will error on the side of caution.



    That's what we got so far... Pretty sure all the non-Apple HD upgrade reports where all is well have also done the SSD too with the y-power... so - hopefully all this discussion will help save some drives.



    Using this strategy, I guess replacing the stock HDD with a SSD would be really easy using a y-splitter or a small SATA power extender. This would make the AHT Pass and keep the fans at bay. Since SSDs don't produce any heat, they would not be in any danger.



    I used the y-splitter at the time because I couldn't find any mini sata power adapter to purchase, but I plan on using one in the future and I will do some more testing and measurements on the HDD PWR once i'll take the iMac apart again.
  • Reply 103 of 105
    rslifkarslifka Posts: 1member
    @maxincuk



    Is a SATA y-splitter all that's needed then to swap out the HDD for an SSD?



    Any one of these will do?



    6IN Serial Ata Power Y Splitter Cable Adapter



    StarTech.com Power Y-s
  • Reply 104 of 105
    habihabi Posts: 317member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by macologist View Post




    Maybe Apple just thinks like this:

    [LIST=1][*]If your HD dies within 3 years of Apple Care, we'll replace it for free, cause it's our HD! [*]If your HD dies after 3 years of Apple Care, we'll replace it with our HD for a Fee, and

    ......

    In that case, if OWC gets their Apple Certification, OWC will be able to do the Installs, right? But then what's the difference in Price and Turn Around Time between sending a Consumer Mac to OWC or Apple Care?

    ......



    Atleast here in Finland I dont need that Applecare as a consumer! Consumer legislation protects my dear investment even after the 1 year warranty has seased. Applecare is still great for companies though!



    If i buy a larger drive from Apple I get 1 year warranty. If I buy the same eg. seagate drive from a parts supplier i get 5 Years warranty. That being said Apples harddisc upgrade is highway robery methinks.... I for one have changed more than 10 macs harddisks for different people i know. And to say that people dont change their drives is a lot off bullshit. I know of no one whom hasnt changed their base drive in their mac. Usually they buy the parts straight away and dont even power on the machine before replacing the parts. If they dont know how to do it they ask someone to do this for them. There are even a lot of resellers that do this inshop and only buy machines with the bare minimals and install bigger disk/more memory for the customer at no special cost (more than selling the parts).
  • Reply 105 of 105
    habihabi Posts: 317member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Crunch View Post


    All of this back-and-forth about something that is nearly obsolete. The minute the first ThunderBolt hard drive is released, we'll be able to boot from an external RAID array like I do with my 4TB WDC RAID 0 NAS via FireWire 800.



    Obviously, the internal drive still boots faster than the 800Mbps FW (1394b) port, but it's great that that's even possible. This is one of my backup methods, co-incidentally and it works great.



    Now think how fast the ThunderBolt connection will be at 12 times the speed of FireWire 800. SATA-III at 6Gbps will be our new bottleneck haha...



    Why would you have to use SATA for a SSD???? That just sucks. PCI-x is just so much better option in regards of bandwidth.... Im Merely confused why dont they just move the sata-if inside the diskcontoller and use the integrated chips via raid like they do for the PCI-X ssd drives out there. Now THOSE are fast...
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