iMac Upgraded to SSD

As much as I didn’t want to believe it, my beloved 24″ iMac that I use at work finally started having harddrive issues. I couldn’t pinpoint if this was an OSX issue (firmware updated, etc) or an actual hardware issue, but the internal harddrive started acting like it was going to sleep all the time, even though that option was turned off. I would be working and I could hear the drive spin down, and everything would hang. Then after a second or two, I could hear the drive spin back up and everything would pick back up. I figured this was as good an excuse as any to upgrade the drive and do a clean upgrade to Snow Leopard. I decided that, since I had a Drobo sitting next to me, I didn’t need much internal storage, but given how much work I do on the machine every day, I wanted something fast. So the decision to use an SSD was a no brainer, specifically a 120GB OCZ Summit drive.

I had to pick up a couple of suction cups, but the overall tear down process to the iMac was pretty easy. I couldn’t find any instructions on taking apart a 24″ iMac specifically, only a 20″, so I winged it. Just pull the glass off, unscrew and remove the front cover, then unscrew the screen and pull it out of the way. The drive sits right behind the screen and removing that was probably the hardest part. It’s held in place with a plastic flange that you have to kind of push and pull to pop the drive out, then just unplug it.

The next difficult part was putting the SSD in. Given that it is a 2.5″ drive instead of 3.5″, I had to get an adapter to make it fit in place.

Here in lied the rub.. Since it’s a smaller drive, the SATA cable wasn’t long enough to reach the drive, and it wouldn’t budge.

I couldn’t swap it out either because it threaded under and around to the bottom of the motherboard. Fortunately, from what I have seen in the pictures, the new 27″ iMac looks a little more forgiving. So, to solve this, I had to jury rig the drive onto the adapter only using one screw, and given that it’s an SSD, I wasn’t too worried. After that, it was pretty easy to put everything back together.

Before I put the glass on, I wanted to piece it together and do a quick test with the Snow Leopard install disk to make sure the drive actually worked, which it did without a hitch.

This was probably a couple of weeks ago that I did this and so far everything has been working great! Apps don’t launch immediately, but usually within two bounces, and my virtual XP machine runs a lot faster than it did. Next two having two screens, running with an SSD is my next productivity improvement recommendation, I highly recommend it for anyone that can afford it!