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New iMac Drive Restrictions
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This sucks. Apple is now requiring custom drives in new iMacs. Anything but an Apple branded drive will fail the hardware test. It’ll cost you more and limit what you put in.
Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad,http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs
http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/05/12/only.secondary.drives.supported/If anyone accuses us of not going after Apple when they are being a jerk, point them at this topic. This time Apple is and we are.
[ Edited: 12 May 2011 04:41 PM by geoduck ]Signature
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Just to make sure, is Apple the sole source of these disks, now and in the future ?
Is the price exorbitant ?
Are authorized repair centers blocked out from normally authorized repairs ?
sorry to play Devil’s Advocate. My iMac is of 2009 era design.
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Just to make sure, is Apple the sole source of these disks, now and in the future ?
Can’t tell about the future but this is a custom plug, a 7 pin SATA rather than the industry std 4 pin. There’s also something about Apple Firmware inside the drive
Is the price exorbitant ?
In my experience any time you have a sole source that’s the tendancy. Also I’m located on Vancouver Island. I can run down to FutureShop or call NCIX and get a drive in one day. Don’t know how long a drive fromApple would take
Are authorized repair centers blocked out from normally authorized repairs ?
No idea. For me the issue is that I want to do the repairs. After all that is my business.
My iMac is of 2009 era design.
Sounds like it starts with the 2011 models
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Millions if not billions of people use computers and the Internet.
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FlipFriddle
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As someone who has added hard drives to every Mac he’s owned so far, I guess I find myself not caring about this (and am a bit surprised about the attitude too). The standard drives are so big nowadays and the new iMacs come with an empty drive bay that you could put anything in, I guess I’m not sure what the big deal is. You can plug-in as many Thunderbolt and Firewire drives as you want too. I guess if you want to customize the crap out of your desktop you could get a MacPro.
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Less is More (more or less).
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As someone who has added hard drives to every Mac he’s owned so far, I guess I find myself not caring about this (and am a bit surprised about the attitude too). The standard drives are so big nowadays and the new iMacs come with an empty drive bay that you could put anything in, I guess I’m not sure what the big deal is. You can plug-in as many Thunderbolt and Firewire drives as you want too. I guess if you want to customize the crap out of your desktop you could get a MacPro.
I order my Macs from Apple and always bump up the hard drive size, but always have several external drives connected. I hate cable clutter, trying to keep it to a minimum I have the external hard drives on a shelf in the back of the desk’s footwell.
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“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.” E. M. Forster
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As someone who has added hard drives to every Mac he’s owned so far, I guess I find myself not caring about this (and am a bit surprised about the attitude too). The standard drives are so big nowadays and the new iMacs come with an empty drive bay that you could put anything in, I guess I’m not sure what the big deal is. You can plug-in as many Thunderbolt and Firewire drives as you want too. I guess if you want to customize the crap out of your desktop you could get a MacPro.
I totally agree. There comes a time when a product has enough and adding more can be done a whole lot easier in other ways. The drive Apple choose looks like a very good drive (check out WD’s website) that should last and run properly in the environment it was designed to go in. Apple engineers didn’t pick any old drive from a bin at Fry’s, they picked a drive that would work properly in the iMac and included options that would keep it running properly (fan control). As for replacing a defective drive, that’s what AppleCare is for.
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This will hurt people a couple years down the road. I’m inclined to believe that it’s the price of having a maximally thin (heh!) design and dealing with hellacious heat that can’t be channeled anywhere. Any other PC manufacturer could go about 1.5x as thick, stick with standard components, and still be freaking awesome. But not Apple, apparently.
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Using a non-standard part for the sake of it is anti-customer. But is that really what Apple has done? I don’t know why Apple went this route. If there’s a valid technical reason for it, then I need to know what that reason is before I can weigh it against the costs. What other design compromise would they have made if they had to stick with standard drives? The problem is, the cons are obvious, but the pros are not.
Using non-standard HDs is a point against the iMac, no two ways about it. The question is whether the iMac should get that point back for some other reason.
Bosco is probably right about the thickness. I wouldn’t care of the iMac were a bit thicker, so right now I view it as entirely negative.
[ Edited: 19 May 2011 12:55 PM by Mikuro ] -
This will hurt people a couple years down the road. I’m inclined to believe that it’s the price of having a maximally thin (heh!) design and dealing with hellacious heat that can’t be channeled anywhere. Any other PC manufacturer could go about 1.5x as thick, stick with standard components, and still be freaking awesome. But not Apple, apparently.
I’m not attacking your comments but PC manufacturers (at least Dell) have been caught using so called “standard” components in their PCs that were actually substandard. I’m not attacking the entire PC world but the common practice of using garbage parts to try and make their margins. I don’t believe Apple generally does this, in other words, you get what you pay for. If Apple sees the need for a special configuration of a hard drive that allows them to monitor and react to high heat, then I look at that as providing a better product.
Someone will end up grabbing one of these WD Caviar Blue drives and reverse engineering the firmware to see how different it actually is and what Apple is doing. Until then, you can purchase an OTS 1TB drive from OWC, http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD10EALS/, for $74 (3Gbps model).
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Is this really a profit motive move by Apple, or could there be an engineering motive behind it?.
Having worked on a number of iMacs from early 2008 models - 2010 models that come across my work table with shutdown/restart issues stemming from thermal sensor problems, I would be willing to bet that there is an engineering purpose behind the move. Heat is a major issue in modern computers (Case in point - look at the massive heat sinks of the Mac Pro series). Gone are the days of classics and colored iMacs which could adequately depend on simple radiative cooling. As such tracking temperatures accurately and consistently is becoming more and more of a necessity. Perhaps attaching an external sensor to a standard hard drive no longer provides the consistent sensitivity needed to keep the new iMacs running at peak efficiency.
I’ve replaced a couple iMac drives in which the replacement was a different model than the original, with a different outer case, which in turn brings up the question: “where is the best place to attach the sensor to this model drive?” Placement DOES make a difference! Having the sensors internal makes for increased accuracy and consistency in keeping track of the HD’s operating temperature.
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“Everything in excess! To really enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.” -Lazarus Long
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I suspect an engineering move without looking at the big picture.
IMO the core of the issue is that drives wear out. Even if you never want to add a larger drive, eventually they wear out and have to be replaced. I can call NCIX and buy a SATA hard drive and have it here tomorrow. I suspect the same will be true in ten years. I have serious doubts as to whether Apple will still be selling custom parts like these drives for 2011 iMacs in 2021. Even if they are they will be very expensive.
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Millions if not billions of people use computers and the Internet.
I build computers and fix the internet.
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Gareth Harris
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There is a detailed discussion of this at:
http://blog.macsales.com/10206-further-explained-apples-imac-2011-model-hard-drive-restrictions
It runs out that there is no sinister conspiracy going on, but rather a problem with non-standard pin allocation on sata drives for the drive temperature sensors. There are some workarounds coming for non-factory drives. Meanwhile be careful with placing components of your choosing inside a tightly engineered package like an iMac. The temperature monitoring and regulation software depends on compliant hardware.
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Gareth Harris
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There is a detailed discussion of this at:
http://blog.macsales.com/10206-further-explained-apples-imac-2011-model-hard-drive-restrictions
It runs out that there is no sinister conspiracy going on, but rather a problem with non-standard pin allocation on sata drives for the drive temperature sensors. There are some workarounds coming for non-factory drives. Meanwhile be careful with placing components of your choosing inside a tightly engineered package like an iMac. The temperature monitoring and regulation software depends on compliant hardware.
Apple is putting 20 pounds into a 10 pound box.
Question for you hardware types. Would a SSD be cooler than a spinning disk hard drive?
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“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.” E. M. Forster
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“.... I’m inclined to believe that it’s the price of having a maximally thin (heh!) design and dealing with hellacious heat that can’t be channeled anywhere. Any other PC manufacturer could go about 1.5x as thick, stick with standard components, and still be freaking awesome. But not Apple, apparently.”
Brad, your post here follows up on the very well-taken point you made in your comment yesterday on Ted Landau’s blog “iMac Hard Drives: Why Did Apple Make Them Hard to Replace?”:
“Probably heating. Since Apple went to the all-in-one screen design, they?ve most definitely pushed the heat envelope to get thinner and sleeker…”,which you apparently made to concur with M. Block’s significant observation:
“My son has a year-old 27? iMac. Uses it for gaming and video editing. The internal temperature is scary hot, and the heat coming out the top of that thing can cook an egg. User forums are full of reports like mine. Happily, the iMac works fine and has never given us any problems, but I suspect it?s pushing the outside of the envelope, temperature-wise. Therefore, I suspect that the new power connectors and firmware have been implemented to keep reliability as high as possible, given the heat that can be generated.”and which John C. Welch then amplified so elucidatingly well upon:
“I doubt that cost-saving was a factor. Otherwise, Apple might have more simply gone for the industry-standard S.M.A.R.T. reporting for temperature. There are some real problems with S.M.A.R.T. for temp data:
1) Not every drive manufacturer implements all parts of S.M.A.R.T. So you have to do rather a bit of work to find drives that have the temp sensing parts of S.M.A.R.T. available. There?s no real minimum requirement to be S.M.A.R.T. - compatible. In fact, you can track a single value, and be ?S.M.A.R.T. compatible?.
2) Even if they do implement temp sensing, they don?t always implement the same values. For example, there are four temperature values, but some are only implemented by one or two companies on specific drives.It does no good to use S.M.A.R.T. for temp sensing when there?s no way to reliably count on S.M.A.R.T. providing the data you need from drive to drive. It makes rather a lot of sense for Apple to not use S.M.A.R.T. in this case, and instead, implement something they can actually rely on.”In summary: I suspect you three have pinpointed the real reason Apple is adopting this so aggressively proprietary & non-standard a mechanism for regulation of the iMac’s HD temperatures; it is the iMac’s extreme thin-ness, which makes temperature regulation just too critical to permit the use of such an unreliable and variably implemented standard as S.M.A.R.T. for that purpose, so therefore no standard HD’s in the marketplace (which all only use S.M.A.R.T.) could possibly work well enough to protect the latest iMac’s components from heat damage. And so I’d say Apple is not being a jerk at all (unless Apple has made these mechanisms so unnecessarily obscure and inscrutable that OWC, etc. cannot find compatible work-arounds or emulations to use with their aftermarket HD upgrades).
[ Edited: 19 May 2011 05:56 PM by LnEJames ] -
Just because there is no conspiracy and no bad intent doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for concern. Regardless of why, this will be a problem for a lot of users down the road if they want to replace the drives. And yes, Sir Harry, mechanical hard drives emit much more heat than SSDs. That energy for 7200RPM has to dissipate somewhere.
One other thing to consider… If you believe that 2-3 years down the road, a 1-2 TB SSD will cost under $100, the whole heat issue is moof. There’s little need for the iMac to get any thinner. Larger screen, perhaps, which would provide more space for heat to dissipate, assuming the larger screen generates heat less than or equally proportionate to the increate.
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@LnEJames: My experience with an iMac G5 taught me all I ever need to know about this
. I like my office warm in the So Cal summers. 82? with windows open is the perfect day for me. It’s not the perfect day for an iMac G5, which went through 3 self-install main logic boards in about a year until they finally shipped me a revised design. That iMac has since found a home with my grandparents, who keep a much cooler home during the summer. And it’s doing great. But you can still warm your hands by placing them under the G5’s ample chin.
