smart-fan-control

Control the speed of a Mac’s HDD fan based on the S.M.A.R.T. temperature reported by the drive.

About

Inspired by this hint, this script sets the speed of the HDD fan based on the temperature reported by the drive itself.

You might ask why?

• Proprietary cable can put the brakes on upgrading Late ’09 iMacs
• Apple Further Restricts Upgrade Options on New iMacs
• Further Explained: Apple’s iMac 2011 Model Hard Drive ‘Restrictions’

This script attempts to achieve something similar to HDD Fan Control, minus the price tag and nice GUI.

Warning

Use this totally at your own risk. This is practically untested and has been knocked together pretty quickly. In fact, you shouldn't really even use this.

Requirements

1. smartctl from the smartmontools package. Using Homebrew:

   brew install smartmontools
   

2. smc from smcFanControl. smc needs to be run as root, or otherwise owned by root with setuid.

   sudo chown root:admin smc
   sudo chmod +s smc
   

Currently, smc needs to be installed at /usr/local/sbin/smc.

Installation

sudo make install

It makes sense to schedule this script to run at a regular interval. There's a launchd plist included to run it every minute.

sudo make install-launchd