Chosen Solution
I have a 3.5” SATA drive that I took out of the WD My Book external so I can plug it into my iMac. But after taking everything apart when I got to the HDD of the iMac I noticed it had a small connector with 2 pins below the SATA plugs and my replacement doesn’t have this. Does this mean I can’t replace the drive with this specific drive and I need to purchase another one that has this 2 pin to plug into the iMac?
The top pic is my iMac and the bottom pic is the WD drive I was going to use but it has a different size plug under the SATA plug
You have one of the drives where it was integrated into the SATA interface. You’re going to need an external sensor to get the HD temperature sensor working to avoid having the fans run at full speed. OWC sells the sensor. Did you check if the drive supports SATA II or is it Fixed III? The pre-2011 iMac is not compatible with SATA III drives, so you need one with the SATA II backwards compatibility. Full autosense is ideal, but not required.
