How to control hard disk fan on iMac?

MMB

Hello! I swapped my iMac 27" (late 2009) internal hard disk for a SSD. On macOS and I need to use the 'Macs Fan Control’ app to manually adjust the hard disk fan to its minimum speed, 1100rpm, as the hard disk temperature sensor doesn’t work on the SSD. But when I boot Solus on an external SSD the fan revs noisily. Is there a similar way to do this on Solus?

Thanks! :

picnerd

You can first test whether your fans are all detected and respond to pwmcontrol.

sudo eopkg it lm_sensors
sudo sensors-detect
Answer all queries with Yes.
and now:
sudo pwmconfig
to test your Fans. Is this okay than you can make a config for autostart.
Here is a HowTo: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=42737

greez

MMB

Hi picnerd!

Thanks for the tips. I can see that on Solus the iMac fans are running at 2100 RPM minimum whereas on macOS they ran at 1000 RPM. Is there an easy way to modify the fans speed? Something with a GUI? I did modify a configuration file but nothing did happen, the fans still ran at 2100 RPM

Thanks again.

picnerd

A graphical tool is unknown to me.
Does the SSD even have to be cooled?
Can not man just turn off the fan in Bios / UEFI or unplug the fan?😉

MMB

hehe I was thinking of unplug the fan as an esay solution!! 😃

I’ll replace the optical drive with another SSD so this is another fan that needs to be unpluged. That would left the iMac with the CPU fan alone. I’ll look if this is a problem or not.

Justin

Interesting to even see drives with fans.

brent

The mbpfan in repo would be a perfect mac fan controller if it wasn't for the fact it was macbook pro only.
I wondered if such an app/daemon existed for an imac with linux installed?
First hit in the search engine was github, where, surprise, the mbpfan creators updated it to work on some Imacs.
Don't know if yours is on the list, but here is the link:
https://github.com/dgraziotin/mbpfan#tested-imacmac-mini-models
Using these words: "imac fan controller linux" I did see some valuable info, re: linux control, as well.

I'm upgrading my old rig soon (DIY) and shopping/researching SSD's and I have to agree with Justin . I never saw one with a fan. Far out.

MMB

brent Hi! My 2009 iMac is not listed. One of the listed iMacs is a 2006 model and the other two are 2011 and 2015 models. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work on mine. I’ll try again, maybe I did something wrong.

Thanks.

picnerd

All SSD upgrade instructions describe the problem with these old IMacs. For the above mentioned software is recommended. With this compact design and a normal hard drive, a fan is probably necessary. 😅

Of course, that's not so easy on Linux. I have looked again on the Internet and have found a guide on ubuntuusers.de. https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/L%C3%BCftersteuerung/
This is unfortunately in German. But I think that's no problem with modern translation tools. It's just an international forum here and you have to google yourself a bit and work to overcome the language barrier.

By the way, fancontrol can also be controlled via Systemd. The instructions I had posted first is a lot too old and there was the problem.
But maybe the brent tool works better.

I wish you success.

greetings

MMB

Hi! After some time tinkering on the Terminal I now have a silent iMac running Solus 😀

Thanks for the links!

brent

picnerd Sounds like he took your advice and did some file editing. I like when someone's old rig (like an Imac) gets an extra performance boost with modern tools.
MMB --Congrats.

picnerd

Excellent! 😄

Which tool helped you?
The info may still be interesting for others.

MMB

Hi!

One of my dogs got ill this afternoon and I have been busy. I’ll report what I did when I boot the iMac on Solus. In short I did read a guide of some website but not on full. I’ll post the URL when I reboot the iMac on Solus. But as brent said I did edit one file after checking the iMac temperatures and compare them to the temperatures under macOS. Then I did reboot the iMac, it was silent.

Remember that for now my Solus SSD is outside the iMac. Let’s see how things unfold when it goes inside replacing the optical drive.

Gona take care of my dog now.
Cheers

MMB

Hi again,

I am back after caretaking of my lovely dogs so I'll try to explain what I did to have a silent iMac. But keep in mind that this iMac has yet to be stressed to check this modifications did not harm.

First I did install 'mbpfan' from Solus Software Center.

I then read and follow this beginner's tutorial for mbpfan, but not all the steps.

https://ineed.coffee/3838/a-beginners-tutorial-for-mbpfan-under-ubuntu/

I'll be quoting the original autor on many of the steps below.

Not sure if I did anything related to install mbpfan from the Terminal because as I said I installed from Software Center. For sure I have done the following Terminal commands to check the minimum and maximum fan speeds.

These are the needed commands:

First thing to do is to take note of the configuration parameters for mbpfan settings. Let’s start with the fan speed’s min and max values that the system was able to detect. Open a terminal, and type the following commands, one at a time.

cd /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/
cat fanmin
cat fanmax

My values for minimum fan speed were:
On Terminal: cat fan*_min
1000
1100
940

And my values for minimum fan speed were:
On Terminal: cat fan*_max
3800
5500
2100

So:

Note down the lowest among the numbers for fan_min.
940

Note down the highest among the numbers for fan_max.
5500

These two values are your min_fan_speed and max_fan_speed values for mbpfan configuration.

Next step:

Now, see what are the max values that the system was able to detect for the temperature.

cat /sys/devices/platform/coretemp./hwmon/hwmon/temp*_max
82000
82000
82000
82000

Note down the highest among the numbers you might obtain.
82000

Divide the number by 1000.
The value you will obtain is max_temp value for mbpfan configuration.

I got 82000. Therefore, my max_temp is 82.

82000/1000= 82

Next step talks about install mbpfan which I have done before. There seems to talk about download, compile and install for what I needed the 'build-essential package'. As I can not remember the command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install build-essential

did work on Solus I installed from the Software Center the 'solbuild Solus package build system (v. 1.4.5-27) but not sure if this what needed for anything.

Next step was to configure mbpfan. As the tutorial explains I did 'open the configuration file using a text editor (like Gedit) with root access.

sudo gedit /etc/mbpfan.conf

And

'The content of the file will be the following:

[general]

min_fan_speed = 2000 # default is 2000
max_fan_speed = 6200 # default is 6200
low_temp = 63 # try ranges 55-63, default is 63
high_temp = 66 # try ranges 58-66, default is 66
max_temp = 86 # do not set it > 90, default is 86
polling_interval = 7 # default is 7

Change the values of min_fan_speed, max_fan_speed, and max_temp to the values that your marked down at the beginning of this tutorial.

And below there the autor says:

"You might note that for max_temp, I suggest to never setting the value above 90. Yet, I got 105. You can set it to any value smaller (never bigger) than the one you obtained before. This is for having a more conservative system. The max_temp value is what mbpfan considers a critical temperature, where the fans have to be set immediately at the maximum possible speed.

The low_temp option can be as low as 50-55 degrees (according to your CPU model). Feel free to try different settings for this value and for high_temp. Mbpfan attempts to keep a low fan speed if the temperature is between low_temp to high_temp."

But before this I went back to macOS to check what temperatures the iMac had and how fast the fans were reeving. As the iMac temperatures where OK with the fans just reeving at 1000rpm I did modify my 'max_temp' to a bigger value than 90F degrees. The iMac was cool and silent over that temp on macOS so I allowed him to go over that temp, I settled for 120F degrees (49C degrees). That could be the trick to the silent iMac. It's running now at about 95F - 35C degrees (CPU core temps) and under 1000RPM on the fans.

Finally I did the remaining steps:

"... turn mbpfan into a system service. Be sure to be back into mbpfan source directory, in the Downloads folder. Then, run the following two commands:

sudo cp mbpfan.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable mbpfan.service

Reboot your system. In order to check that mbpfan is up and running, open a terminal again, and give the following command.

ps aux | grep mbpfan

If there is a line ending with /usr/sbin/mbpfan, you are good to go.

You can delete the files in the Downloads folder, they are not needed anymore."