Does the Late 2009 iMac i7 have dual channel SATA II?

I certainly wish you would've asked me that before I placed my bracket and thermal sensor order with OWC. It's due to be delivered any day now.

The other problem is, "the powers that be" who maintain this forum don't like revelations about personal or contact info. And sadly, there's no way for any forum member to "PM" another forum member either, like you can in regular forums. So it seems that the only way to privately contact someone is to somehow reveal some level of personal info and then hope the recipient reads it before it gets zapped from this forum. Again, it's terrible unfortunate the way this forum is setup. We Apple users are a "community." And while I understand the rules that are in place to protect us, we lack those rules elsewhere and are not ravaged by packs of wild dogs.

Sorry.

I still prefer iMacs because, being a family man with two children, I cannot afford a Mac Pro, nor would my wife love me anymore if I took out a loan for one. 😉

My iMac experience is mixed.

My early 2009 iMac9,1 (DuoCore) at the office never failed. It never got hot either. It was always quiet. But through years of OS X updates, it became almost too slow to use. The RAM was capped at 8GB too. The only down side to the machine is that when another person in our office learned of my getting a new office iMac17,1, they wanted it upgraded with a Samsung EVO 850 SSD, and as I reported, the speed is not SATA II. You only get 150MB/s. It might be the bracket used, or it might be the silly Nvidia chipset. I don't have time to reopen the machine to find out.

My late 2009 iMac11,1 (QuadCore) at home failed right about the time AppleCare expired. It was the video card. I wrote Tim Cook and he kindly got an Apple executive to contact me, and ultimately it was arranged that a special case could be made for me, and they swapped out the video card for free. However, it took them two tries. The first swap had the same problem. The second swap worked and I've been using that iMac since. Had I not had AppleCare, it would have cost a huge amount to repair it. And like you said, now in late 2015, some of those old parts aren't available even if you want to pay to repair it.

Of course, Apple would prefer I ditch this old iMac and buy a new one. But the cost of an SSD upgrade is much lower than the cost of a new iMac. And my family finances won't permit a new iMac this year or next, hence the SSD purchase. I only bought a single SSD because I wanted to play it safe AND have the option to use File Vault (which you can't use if you have an internal RAID).

So as much as I'd love to have a Mac Pro, it just is impossible when you consider the cost. And besides, it's old 2013 tech too. You'd best wait for a Mac Pro refresh. It might take a few months, but I know it's coming.

Well, my OWC thermal sensor & NewerTech AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" mounting bracket arrived, and I installed my Samsung EVO 850 1TB SSD today. The hardest part was putting the glass back on while keeping dust particles off the glass. Even a tiny spec bugs me, so I spent a lot of time on that. Man, I need a clean room for that job! But finally I got it on and boy does it boot fast. Apps fly. Here are my speed test and machine specs screen shots (private data blacked out):

Black Magic Speed Test (3G speeds):

http://cl.ly/3P1T2a0k3844

System Profiler Info, showing SSD specs with TRIM enabled:

http://cl.ly/042k1m0D1m39

I enabled TRIM via the Terminal using: sudo trimforce enable . I read a lot of scaremongering (by misinformed folks) saying that you shouldn't enable it for the EVO 850, but I also read that OS X does not use TRIM in a way that would cause problems. Read through this entire thread for details. I've used TRIM at the office with 2 EVO 850 SSDs without problems too, so I confidently enabled it on my home machine too.

System Profile Info, showing details about my iMac 11,1, OS, RAM, etc. (and yes, I've been using 1333MHz RAM on this iMac for years with no problems):

http://cl.ly/2h1n1S2T0w00

Of course, I could get faster speeds by adding a second 1TB SSD in the optical drive bay, but I would lose FileVault (not compatible with RAID), and I just didn't want to spend that much money on this iMac. 3G speeds will suffice for my home machine, until I decide to replace it with a 5K iMac (perhaps a couple years hence, finances allowing).

All said, this upgrade (except for stupid dust behind the glass) went smoothly. I got the SSD for a discount on Amazon's Lightning sale too, which really made my day. Best wishes to all who pursue the same path I did.

With the iMac, it depends on what year and what tech you buy. We bought a new late 2015 SkyLake 5K iMac at the office. It's fan runs at 1200rpm most of the time. It's very quiet and does not get hot. When using some big name apps for photo and video editing, the fans will ramp up, but it does not sound like a wind tunnel, and even then the back side is never "too hot" to the touch. In contrast this old 2009 iMac 11,1 gets very hot, especially in the back upper left corner. But now that I've swapped out a big heat source (the HDD) and replaced it with an SSD, the fans don't ramp up much and it runs cooler. No, it's not as cool as the Skylake 5K iMac, but it's better. The SkyLake iMac at our office, BTW, has 1TB of Apple flash inside. So there is no spinning HDD to heat things up. We ought, therefore, to not compare Apple's latest iMac with that of the past. Even the 5k iMac (Haswell) from 1 year ago, was claimed to have been a beast when it came to heat and fan noise. But my experience with the Skylake 5K iMac at the office has been nothing but good. And no doubt as future chip generations come out, if Apple can learn from it's past cooling mistakes as it has with the Skylake 5k iMac, future iMacs should be just as good or better. So don't write off the iMac too quickly.

Apple made it official within the past few days...

Vintage and obsolete products - Apple Support

Which means that the late 2009 iMac (which you and I own) became "obsolete" in 6 years. Eight to ten years would be nicer, but Apple moves on a different timeline. I understand their thinking, of course. I simply don't have the pocket money to replace $2k+ computers as often as so many people on the internet obviously do. And now with all of us thinking exclusively about SSDs (and for good reason), to get a reasonably sized Apple branded SSD in a new iMac (namely, 1TB), you will no longer be paying $2000 for the iMac. That price is from the "good old days" that are now gone. Now, for even the base CPU and RAM, adding 1TB of flash (SSD) will cost you $2900. And that's if you're blessed to live in the USA. I live in Japan. Thanks to the Japanese government wanting to tackle what they claimed to have been "deflation," the Yen is now 25% weaker against the Dollar, which means people like me must take that US Dollar price and then tack on 25% for the weakness of the Yen (ever-rising sales tax not included). Other countries have similar issues with their currencies against the Dollar. So buying a new iMac that has "modern" and "reasonable" specifications is no small decision, especially when one considers that expensive machine will be officially "obsolete" in 6 years.

That doesn't mean I am against iMacs. Not at all. Indeed, they are still the best value of any computer, if you are seeking a powerful, modern, OS X machine. I am not into video editing for my job, for example, but as a father who shoots lots of family videos, I need a fast machine to edit those videos. iMacs with SSDs allow one to do that quite well.

What all this means is that we must (a) have a good paying job, and (b) save every penny we lay our hands on. This is harder to do if you are married and have kids, and decide to put your kids in a private school overseas so they have an American (or English) education. And since Apple doesn't offer educational discounts for anyone other than college students (at least, Apple Japan doesn't), you the parent pay the full brunt of the cost. Again, I don't mention these truths to knock Apple in any way. They are merely the facts we buyers and Apple fans must mull prior to purchase.

For now, I upgrade, which is the subject and theme of this thread. In my mind, my late 2009 iMac is not yet obsolete. I thank God my machine was covered by Tim Cook and that the video card was replaced free of charge before they ran dry of parts. I feel for you, Switch900. I really do. Maybe search EBAY for a replacement video card? It would be cheaper than buying a new machine. I certainly don't want to see you leave the Mac fold and depart to the Dark Side of Windows.

Best wishes, and Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas to you as well, Switch!

And to supplement what I wrote before about keeping old Macs running strong, here's a sample from my Flickr photo collection. It still works and connects to the Internet too!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/66071596@N00/2789811500/

I don't know if Apple intentionally designs in a finite life. More likely it is their fetish about making things thinner with virtually no fan noise. A smaller enclosure with a slow running fan means more heat, and heat kills electronics fast. The Macs of old had more room for air to flow. They were built like tanks. Macs today are faster and look much better, but they have shorter life spans. On some level, Apple likes that because they think they can sell more. But as I posted earlier, many of us are not made of money. Money doesn't grow on trees either. So it's difficult for us to buy new Macs often. I'd love to, but I just can't afford it.

With that said, there's no way I am going to Windows. I've been a Mac user since I was 13 in 1984, when my Dad brought home a Mac 128k. I'll always be a Mac fan, doing what it takes to keep the equipment I have alive and functional for as long as possible. Speaking of which, I'd put an SSD in my SE/30 if it was easier. But getting a SCSI drive setup is much more complicated than SATA.