Chosen Solution
I have to replace the 3TB seagate drive on my iMac 27” 2014 retina. I have Mojave installed on the separate 128GB blade ssd. Is there a hard drive that will work on the iMac without the fans going crazy? I heard the drive needs to have apple firmware. Just want to pop a cheap spinning drive inside for storage. I don’t wanna spend the dough on the thermal sensor. My other option is buying a 1TB ssd but then I would need the thermal sensor.
The newer iMac’s 2013 onward appear not to need the thermal sensor. The age of the drive you use also is a factor! If you are using a newer generation you’ll be OK as they are using the newest version of SMART services. I would recommend going with a Seagate FireCuda as the best drive you can get. I’m not a fan of the higher 3 TB and larger HDD’s as they tend to need more power & cooling than what this system can offer. Besides putting your data at risk. Don’t forget your external Thunderbolt ports are much faster than the SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) interface! Do make sure your system is not currently setup in a Fusion Drive set. As that will complicate things.
This is probably not the best solution but you can use the Macs fan control app to adjust the hard drive fan speed so that it is not noisy after loading MacOS.
Is this also the case with a late 2012 iMac? I need to replace the HDD and am also worried about fan/temp.
