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haravikk

macrumors 65832
Original poster
May 1, 2005
1,504
26
So I'm looking to increase capacity in a late 2009 iMac, and it occurs to me that I could also give it a slight performance boost while I'm at it by opting for an SSHD rather than a regular drive; of course I could use an SSD instead for the biggest gains, but the capacity is the most important concern, and an SSD would be more money than I want to spend.

Anyway, as I understand it the headache with the 2009 iMac is that it uses a vendor-specific cable into the hard-drive for temperature sensing, rather than a probe on the drive itself (or querying S.M.A.R.T. status over the data cable) so you can't just use any third party drive without an adaptor kit.

The drive currently in the machine is a 500gb Western Digital model, so I'm wondering if a WD Blue SSHD would still function as a drop-in replacement? Has anyone tried this? Specifically I was thinking of this drive (Amazon.co.uk). Can anyone confirm that the Apple provided temperature sensor remains compatible with new Western Digital drives such as this one?
 
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