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4TB drives
- Thread starter GLS
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If you have a 2011 iMac, you have thunderbolt. I'd be concerned about heat by putting a drive without the iMac's particular thermal pinouts into the iMac itself (and currently no 4TB drives on the market have this). Better to put the drive or drives into a thunderbolt enclosure and get essentially the same speed with no worries and an added bonus of swap-and-replace upgradability later. But in terms of software function, yes, OS X and the hardware will work with it just fine. Your only concern would be the thermal management system. Note that this only applies to the 2010 or 2011 iMac as my understanding is that the 2009 iMacs used normal HDD pinouts (but have no thunderbolt, natch).
That's not a very cost effective option IMHO. Do the 4TB drives produce that much more heat over the 3TB drives? Plenty of people put 3TB drives in their iMacs and they're fine. I'm planning on putting a 4TB into mine for storage once the 2012 models come out (and hopefully 2x256GB Samsung 830's in RAID-0 as the OS drive).
It's less a matter of the drive producing heat as it is the 27" iMac producing a lot of heat and the drive being right in there with no thermal relief for what heat it DOES generate and for the heat around it. My understanding is that the thermal pinout allows for better fan control to relieve this. But certainly I won't argue with you that thunderbolt enclosures are still a bit pricey at this stage. I guess in the end it depends on the risk level you're comfortable with. Also how cool you keep the room your iMac is in, generally. Best of luck.