Installing SSD in 24" iMac (early 2009)

You have to make your own decision as to how much you need in size: when you ave enough free disk space when you have 480GB you do not need more, but with a SSD free disk psace is much more important than with HDD: enough may be 30GB on a HDD, but I advise to have 100GB free disk space on a SSD (to make sure the GarbageCollection is efficient enough); and in that case you don't have to mess with the OS to enable Trim.

finally,

i decided to buy CruicialM500 240GB for 100€. I will mount the ssd in the optical bay and install only OS and software. All other data stay on my "old" hdd.

even though i will not get the maximum speed from ssd (due to dvd-Drive-bus-speed) the performence should increase anyway.

so i spent approximately 100€ for the ssd and about 50€ for the adapter kit.

if i still need better performance i get a newer mac :-) and sell the old one.

still good machine if you are not into e.g. video editing etc.

i let you know about the "assembling"process...

cheers

The SSD is 6GB/s, your main drive sata is 3GB/s, no problem, but the optical drive connector may be 1.5GB/s which will make the ssd slower (the crucial will step down 2 steps), but I am not sure that the optical bay connector really is sata, it may be even 'lower' than that and then it will not connect the ssd at all (and not your hdd either).

In SystemInformation (in the Utilities folder) you can read what connector you have in the optical bay).

btw: the adapter should be much cheaper than the 50€ you mention.

Thanks for your reply.

i'll mount ssd in optical bay and find out. if i am in the mood i will switch the ssd from optical bay to hdd-slot...

have to check my system with system profiler :-) don't know what i have inside my mac.

the adapter includes: external housing for dvd-drive and adapter for ssd to fit in dvd-bay. 50€ is fine for me in this case.

Finally, I did it.

And it works just fine. Thanx to ifixit i had a good manual on how to take apart an iMac.

Speed did absolutely improve. Start up time:

old: 2,5 min

new: 45 seconds.

of course the system runs faster in general now. I am happy now :-)

thanks for your support guys!

I'm keen to do this but not to loose the optical drive. Is there a way of doing this?

Yes it is.

I Bought a ssd adapter kit.

IPit includes a housing for the optical drive. it works just fine (USB plug and play).

Using a SSD instead fo the normal HDD without loosing the optical drive is perfectly possible.

Normally the easiest way to do this is putting the new SSD in an external closure, format it with DiskUtility with Mac OS Extended (journaled), 1 partition GUID Partition Table.

Then make a bootable clone of your system disk to this external SSD (with CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper).

Then restart while holding the Alt(option) key and choose the external SSD from the boot menu to startup.

If all works fine, shutdown and swap the SSD into the HDDk place.

Close your machine and restart. Ready.

Look at videos on OWC, or iFixit sites.

Lex

Hey all, I seem to be in the same camp here, but ran into a snag. Let me tell you my config.

- 27" imac (late 2009).

- Crucial M500 480 GB SSD

- OWC Temp reader for HD upgrade

I was planning on replacing the hard drive that my imac came in. I used Acronis to clone my existing drive to the Crucial M500. However after I installed it, my imac doesn't seem to be recognizing the drive. It went into a recovery mode and attempted to reinstall the OS from my Time Machine, but it couldn't even see the new SSD installed. Any ideas on why this might happen? Have I connected something wrong? I double checked the connections. Do I need to reformat the drive and do a clean install? Or should I do another attempt at cloning my previous drive?

Any info on this would be great. Thanks.

Are you sure the sata connector cable is correctly fitted? and undamaged?

Before the cloning: did you correctly formatted the new SSD (GUID partition table; Mac OS Extended (journaled)).

After you make the clone and before replacing the HDD with it, you should start up the iMac while holding the Alt(option) key: in the start menu you then choose the new clone to start up: when everything is OK, you can switch the SSD in the HDD bay. Then you will be sure that the clone is OK:

Lex

Just remember, Apple does not officially support TRIM on non-apple SSDs..

Found out the issue. What I thought had originally cloned the drive, actually did not clone the drive.... 😐

I used the disk utility from another mac and did it properly and everything now works without a problem. WHEW!

issue solved?

Yes! Everything working perfectly again, with a noticeable increase in app load times and boot up speed.

I ended up using a free trial version of the Carbon Copy Cloner. https://bombich.com/

And had 0 issues. I connected the temp reader to a nice flat part of the SSD drive, and everything running smoothly.

great, happy computing.🙂