replacment of exisiting hard drive on 2011 Imac

There are hundreds available that will work. I went with an OWC SSD and used their install kit on my 27" 2011. The SSD is behind the SuperDrive which allows me to keep both internal HD for storage and the SSD. OWC has great instructions online, a tool kit including the correct cable and the best support. You can find what you need at www.macsales.com.

Another good DIY site is > https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel_27%22_EMC_2429

It has both a Hard Drive and a Dual Hard Drive guide.

Honor Flight wrote:

Now I think my question is evolving to:

Do I have to have an SATA regular hard drive in addition to a 2.5 solid state draive if I should wish to utilize the ssd?

Pros and cons of eliminating (if possible the regular SATA hard drive in favor of the 2.5 inch SSD?

Thanks

Pros additional internal storage and quick speeds with both internal SATA HD and internal SSD.

Cons additional expense, eventually ALL HD's fail.

Honor Flight wrote:

Do I have to have an SATA regular hard drive in addition to a 2.5 solid state draive if I should wish to utilize the ssd?

Nope'

However using dual drives gives you the ability to run OS X and App's on the faster SSD, while keeping and accessing your media libraries on the HDD. Which is faster and more reliable than accessing your media libraries from an external hard drive.

The way I see it,

you buy an HDD, a smaller (120 or 240GB) SSD and the dual drive kit for just under $300.

or you buy a large SSD and the dual drive kit (for the cable and tools) at well over $300.

Honor Flight wrote:

While I very much appreciate both responses, I feel I am obtuse.

I fail to understand if a clear answer was given regarding replacing the dead SATA drive with ONLY a 2.5 SSD.

In reading the forums there are many references to installing a second drive (2.5 inch ssd).

I was unable to find any that directly adressed the issue of repacment of old style with the newer.

Please forgive my techinical ignorance.

Thanks again for your patience.

It's really pretty simple. Replace the dead HD with a new HD (put in the capacity you want) then while you have the computer open install the SSD behind the SuperDrive per the instructions here . You will also need this kit .

Once everything is installed, if you have a bootable clone of the old system, boot from that External Hard Disk and format the SSD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then restore from the clone to the SSD. Then boot from the SSD to test it. If it works okay (and it should) then format the new internal HD the same as the SSD and then use it as your new internal storage drive.