Chosen Solution

Update/TL;DR: 7 years later the OWC still works fine. Hi, My stock 1TB HDD crashed. So I did the following: Upgraded to a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD disk.Installed Lion, (6h later it was done. The computer was really slow, and fan reved 999 billion RPM)Updated to ‘YouishyuiTomato’ over night. (Still slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter.)Downloaded a fancontroller. Did nothing.Noticed that Kernal_task uses 300% cpu. (Actually 300%) Was trying to do the following 5 steps.:

  1. Go to About this Mac under the apple in the upper left and click on More info
  2. Click on system report
  3. Make a note of what it says after Model Identifier
  4. go to your master drive – System -Library – Extensions – IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext -Contents – Plugins – ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin.kext – Contents – Resources – find the name from step 3 and move it to a folder that you can find again if needed.
  5. Restart and you’re done Failed to find my model (iMac13,2)Removed ALL the files in the Resources folder. Still 300% cpu usage, and fan reving max. And here I am. Is a SATA to SATA with a thermal sensor my only help? If so, is ther any more variants then OWC? Is ther any software to trick their is a sensor? Regards Update (07/13/2015) Hi again. I dowloaded “Macs Fan Control 1.3.0”, And that one did work to control the fan. But does not solve the real issue, 300% kernel_task cpu usage. However, the Fan control app. reads the temp. sensors. Even the SSD. How come a 3-part app. does, but my imac doesn’t? Since all that the OWC cable is doing is to read the HDD temp, Is the OWC cable really going to solve my problem? Is ther a built-in app were i can read the tempsensores in mac OS 10.10.3? Regards Sami

The OWC solution is the best way here. I don’t know of anyone else that offers the needed adaptor cable. We’ve used five of these with SSHD’s and SSD’s in the newer ‘Thin iMac Series’ which shouldn’t matter here. It does work!

Simple answer - YES! The OWC adapter cable is creating the needed input for the SMC to control the fans based on the thermal conditions in real time. This is why we don’t like software solutions.