![]() ![]() ![]() If the hardware report says everything is fine with your fan, your issue is probably a software one. But look at all the steps carefully, and only proceed if you’re completely confident you can get this done yourself. It’s not impossible, however: check out iFixIt‘s guides if you want to attempt the repair yourself. I managed to replace my own broken fan on a 2011 MacBook Pro, but the internals inside more recent Macs are a great deal less friendly for home repair. My advice: head to the Apple Store or any authorized Apple repair shop. If you have a broken fan, you need to replace it. Your Mac will test your hardware, and let you know if your fan is broken. Turn your computer off, then hold the “D” key while turning it on. Hopefully we won’t have too many more hard drives that need to be replaced before these older iMacs get retired and replaced with new models featuring SSDs, but if we do getting the fans under control will be simple.Think your fan might be broken? The first thing you should do is launch Apple Diagnostics, one of the hidden startup options on your Mac. An installs array with an md5checksum will make sure the proper configuration gets reinstalled if a user were to ever change settings in the application GUI. With that established I created a package to deploy the config file in the right location with the right privileges and imported it into Munki as an update_for SSD Fan Control. Thankfully some quick testing showed that a config file with the desired settings can be copied to a different computer and they will be honored without even having to open the application. Instead it is storing settings in some format I’m not familiar with. The next wrinkle is that this config file is not a standard plist that can be easily changed with a defaults write or managed with a configuration profile. The handy FSMonitor by Matthias Keiser allowed me to easily pinpoint that SSD Fan Control is storing it’s configuration at: /Library/StartupItems/SSDFanControl/config Since this manual configuration change survives a reboot the application is obviously writing the setting to disk somewhere, but I couldn’t find the preference in any of the usual locations. While it is easy enough to manually change the mode of operation from “Auto” to “ SMART” in the GUI, this won’t scale well or allow the easy re-imaging of these computers in the future. However by default the program runs in “Auto” mode for the hard drive which isn’t what we need. This allows the use of a replacement hard drive or SSD without the fans going crazy. SSD Fan Control can read the temperature reported by the hard drive and use it to control the fans, adjusting them as needed. (Read this excellent article by Alan Siu for details on this method of manifest management.) Installing the application on targeted computers is easy with Munki using a group manifest that can be set as an included manifest for the computers that need it. It hasn’t been updated since 2013 but still works great under macOS Sierra and has the bonus of being completely free. After evaluating several I settled on SSD Fan Control by Exirion. There are a variety of applications out there that allow the fan speed inside a Mac to be controlled. Thankfully software exists to work around this and I automated the installation and configuration with Munki, read on to see how. Installing a new hard drive or SSD results in the fans running at full blast. The only downside is that the OEM hard drives ship with specific Apple firmware that ties into the thermal management system. The computers still work fine otherwise and since it is pretty easy to replace them (it can easily be accomplished in under ten minutes without removing the display) that is what we’ve been doing. This year we started seeing a problem with the hard drives failing inside our 2009, 20 iMacs here at the newspaper. ![]()
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