Anyone bitten the bullet and replaced the optical drive with an SSD on a pre-2010 iMac?

Was it ok, or should I ebay this one and save up for a newer model?

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I did it. Well obviously I got a shop to do it, life is too short to dismantle an iMac yourself.

I had an OCZ 120GB drive installed. And again two weeks later when it died with no warning. When that one died with no warning two months later I insisted they install a Crucial drive. Been sweet ever since.

The SSD means it boots up in 30 seconds and applications start very quickly: with dock animation turned the application icon only gets to bounce once before the app is up and running.

But restricted disk size due to cost, not to mention the experiences noted above mean that I now run my iTunes and Lightroom libraries on external drives. So speed given with one hand is taken away with the other.

Put a 1TB seagate hybrid ssd in my 2008 imac a couple of weeks back. Lots of T8 and T6 screws to fiddle with but not that difficult an upgrade. Boots in no time and apps start quickly. Well worth it.

spw3 – when did you do it? Just referring to your cost thing… if it was a while ago fair enough, but I think (just my opinion anyway) that SSD drives are not so expensive now especially 256GB ones and even some 512GB ones…

Did my 2011 iMac a while ago (additional drive, in the space next to the optical drive). Not as hard as I was expecting, the iFixit guides are good – just need to be organised with your screws. I have a bit of paper with strips of double-sided tape to stick them to.

256GB is the sweet spot for SSD prices at the moment.

Another recommendation for Mac Rumours and iFixit and I would add OWC, look at the online videos. FWIW I repaced the hardrive and upgraded the ram in my 2009 Mini which was pretty straightforward and the machine is now running very sweetly. I’d suggest you do the upgrade (256 or maybe 512) and perhaps more ram at same time (depending what you have currently).

If you download blackmagic speed test you can see how fast your HDD is running (guess its a 5200rpm one so 75 read/write) my 7200rpm HDD gives 110 and an SSD would run about 250. Note that your iMac will be SATA 2 so max SSD speed will be about 250 so no point buying the fastest SATA3 SSDs – so Samsung Evo 840 rather than the Pro model. Anyway post a question up on MacRumors or search their forum

Edit by the way why not just replace the HDD with an SSD ? Anyway whatever you do you can get the iMac to boot off the SSD as I assume you’ll put the OS onto it.

Certainly for the 2011 iMacs the regular hard drive has a temperature sensor – so if it’s not the original drive (or a special replacement) the fans go crazy. You can control them with a bit of software that then reads the other temp sensors, ignoring the missing HD one, but it’s all a bit of a faff.

SSD + HDD works well, use the latter for things like iTunes files that don’t need to be on anything quick.

I did it on my 2008 24″ iMac. Used the SSD as a boot drive and for stuff I wanted fast disk access to (applications and some videos mainly). Kept the mechanical disk in the chassis and used that to store downloads, documents and ‘stuff’

You can set it all up with symbolic links in such a way that OS X doesn’t really feel any different to single disk setup.

In terms of performance it was fine for my needs.

I eventually sold that iMac without the SSD for £500 and bought a second hand 27″2012 iMac i7 which now has the SSD installed. The 27″ cost me an extra £600 on top of what I sold the 24″ for and to be honest it wasn’t really worth the upgrade – there was nothing wrong with the 2008 24″ c2 duo

The hardware / screwdrivery bit is fine if you take a bit of time and follow the youtube or ifixit guides.

I see apple have something called a ‘fusion drive’ now supported from OSX 10.8.2. It’s basically an HDD joined with an SSD at HW level. OS X sees only a single disk as opposed to 2x disks with the SSD_HDD setup.

The advantage of this setup is that OS X sees it as a single drive and has clever code that will automatically move objects that could benefit from performance into the SSD part of the drive and archives stuff that is not used regularly to the HDD part of the drive. (In my current setup I have hard coded OS X, apps and some videos to the SDD with fusion drive OS X would sort it all out for me a fusion drive would be more flexible and possibly more performant)

There are some guides as to how to DIY one.

DIY fusion drive

hope this helps

Hello from my now rejuvenated Mac. 240GB SSD and a 2TB hybrid SSD drive and it now runs like the clappers

Took 15 mins for hardware and an hour to reinstall OSX, happy days!