You know that feeling of accomplishment when you’ve overcome a huge obstacle and you can’t wait to tell the entire world about it? Well, we’ve got it; we’ve overcome the whole “fan/drive sensor” problem found when installing a non-factory drive in the 2011 iMacs. That means we can now officially announce the OWC Turnkey Program for the 2011 iMacs.
We’re also going to one-up the 2010 program by including upgrade options for both the 21.5″ and the 27″ 2011 iMac models.
That drive sensor thing was a big hurdle. Apple uses a custom firmware that sends temperature info in a non-standard fashion. Unfortunately, unless the drive has this special firmware, the fans spin at full speed. We wanted a solution that would be a long-term solution that wasn’t dependent on a software patch or hack. Though those sorts of fixes can be temporarily effective, we didn’t want to rely on them for two reasons:
- they put overhead on the bus which can reduce performance
- a software solution can can fail or be rendered non-functional by a wide variety of actions (software updates, system reinstalls, etc.) which could risk the hard drive and the data contained on it.
So, we went another route and developed a hardware solution that interfaces accurately and properly with what can be viewed as a frustratingly unique temperature data monitoring method by Apple. While our solution adds a little bit to the cost of upgrading the iMac’s hard drives, we feel that cost is more than offset by the advantages it has over software solutions. Article Continues…

For those of you who want to let your 