Installing SSD in 24" iMac (early 2009)

Hi, just to report a successful swap of HDD to SSD inside iMac Early 2009 model.

I just replaced Apple HDD Hitachi 640Gb with Samsung 840 Evo 250GB.

Couple of remarks:

- Following iFixit manual - they don't mention you have to unscrew the memory bay cover at the bottom to release the whole bezel part while opening the iMac.

- I didn't have to buy additional thermal part, as I could simply re-attach external one attached to HDD, where I placed it very close to SATA connectors - the fan runs at minimal speed after the replacement (I bought 2.5" --> 3.5" drive tray)

- I used cloning software (SuperDuper!) to copy the whole drive (with bootable option checked) connected to one of USB ports

-- with very low transfer over USB of course, around 75GB copied over 2 hours

-- it did boot from USB connected SSD after the clone copy was finished

and then after I swapped drives it did boot nicely.

The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmark reports:

Write: 198MB/s

Read: 269MB/s

You are not going to reach the speeds of an ssd.

Difference between SATA I, SATA II and SATA III

SATA II (revision 2.x) interface, formally known as SATA 3Gb/s, is a second generation SATA interface running at 3.0 Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 300MB/s.

SATA III (revision 3.x) interface, formally known as SATA 6Gb/s, is a third generation SATA interface running at 6.0Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 600MB/s. This interface is backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s interface.

SATA II specifications provide backward compatibility to function on SATA I ports. SATA III specifications provide backward compatibility to function on SATA I and SATA II ports. However, the maximum speed of the drive will be slower due to the lower speed limitations of the port.

Example: SanDisk Extreme SSD, which supports SATA 6Gb/s interface and when connected to SATA 6Gb/s port, can reach up to 550/520MB/s sequential read and sequential write speed rates respectively. However, when the drive is connected to SATA 3 Gb/s port, it can reach up to 285/275MB/s sequential read and sequential write speed rates respectively.

Hi David, SATAIII is supposed to be SATA II compatible, I'm not sure all are though.

Does it have a Sndforce chipset? How much over provisioning does it have?

Just for info see some of these...

http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?&model=310&type=Internal%20Drive&so rt=pop&cat=2999

Done this upgrade a couple of times without issue David. The heat sensor is indeed an external device on this model so upgrade will not cause the fans to spin up.

Basically, more over provisioning is good, it means the drive is bigger than stated, & is used for mapping out bad cells for one thing, a 120GB SSD with 7% over provisioning is actually 128GB underneath...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Over-provisioning

General you want Sandforce chipset, but do you have more info on the nVidia issues?

OWC actually tests these things, I doubt Crucial does.

I think you are going to run into problems when you want to put a new SSD into the superdrive bay:

the standard HDD bay has a sata-2 (3GB/s) connector which is one step down from the modern sata-3 SSD's and those are downwards compatible: but not 2 steps without possible issues.

The superdrive slot is Ultra-ata 100 which may not work to put an SSD in.

Bua the 2.5" SSD and put it in the standard HDD slot.

CORRECTION:

the 24" early 2009 has one disk bay only, which is sata2. In general you can go downwards 1 step, thus a sata-3 could be used. Perhaps you can buy a sata-2 SSD which then is much cheaper.

Yes, as I said the ssd sata-3 is compatible downwards to sata-2.

Sandisk, Samsung, Crucial, Intel, there are a lot of good SSD's.

Some possible insight to those linked problems from OWC's site...

This OWC 6G SSD Model is compatible with nearly any Mac or PC model with a Serial ATA connection (SATA, SATA 2.0, or SATA 3.0) including:

• All Mac Pro models
• All PowerMac G5 models
• All MacBook Pro models NOTE exceptions below
• All Mac mini 2006-Current (All Intel Models)
• iMac 2006-current (All Intel Models)
• iMac G5
• All MacBook models NOTE model exceptions below
• Xserve 2009

Special note for specific 2008-2010 MacBooks & 2008-2009 MacBook Pros.

We highly recommend the use of a SATA 2.0 (3Gb/s) SSD such as the OWC Mercury Electra 3G for the following Macs:

MacBook Pro models with model ID:

How to find the model ID

• MacBookPro5,1
• MacBookPro5,2
• MacBookPro5,3
• MacBookPro5,4
• MacBookPro5,5

MacBook models with model ID:

How to find the model ID

• MacBook5,1
• MacBook6,1
• MacBook7,1

While a 6G SSD does function, it will only do so at SATA Revision 1.0 (1.5Gb/s, 150MB/s) speeds rather that the SATA Revision 2.0 (3.0Gb/s 300MB/s) speed the computer can deliver.

The Mercury Electra 3G SSD is the OWC recommended upgrade option for the Macs listed in the special note above.

Well, looks the the diff is a 5 year warranty vs. 3 yr warranty, on HDDs I don;t think I've ever gone wrong getting the more expensive longer warranteed ones.

Curiously, the cheaper one doesn't stae MTBF under non existent Reliabilty...

The differencepro vs non-pro is the larger "over-provisioning" in the pro:

this means that when a spot is considered faulty by the ssd, it will be replaced by a spot in the extra space, this extra space is larger in the pro than in the normal one. The extra space is not used as user space.

SSD have a longer lifetime than HDD and I expect that the 840 has a much longer lifetime than your computer, I never use the pro versions.