I do keep up-to-date backups so I was prepared for an eventual failure, but modern consumer SSD’s are finally affordable enough that upgrading the internal drive started to make a lot of sense. Commercial-grade spinning hard drives have an average lifespan of about 5 years, so mine was probably nearing the end of its life. However, I was starting to feel a little uneasy about the internal hard drive, a 500 GB, 7200 RPM model from Seagate. Now it’s a year later and the iMac continues to perform admirably for a machine of its age. I like to use my computers for as long as possible and this one had served me well, so I saw no compelling reason to spend upwards of $1000 to replace it. It turned out to be a relatively inexpensive repair, about $180, so I figured it was worth it to keep my iMac around a bit longer. I thought long and hard about whether it was time to replace my then 5-year-old iMac, but I decided to take it to the Genius Bar and see how much it would cost to repair it instead. Then, about a year ago, my graphics card died. Apple officially supports only up to 4 GB, but it’s been tested many times on the Internet that these iMacs actually support up to 6 GB, so I decided to go for it and had no problems whatsoever.

About two years ago I upgraded it with the highest amount of RAM it can get: 6 GB. It was the top-of-the-line configuration then, with a Core 2 Duo processor clocked at 3.06 GHz. My iMac is a 24-inch model from early 2008.

In fact, your machine can perform better than it ever did, even when it was new. That’s the main reason people swear by their SSD’s: if you put a modern SSD inside an old computer, it’s like rolling the clock back a few years. What the combination of these two situations amounts to is simple: you start seeing more beach balls, your entire computer appears to be frozen for a few seconds at a time, and the general “snappiness” of the system is gone.Īn SSD, on the other hand, has no moving parts to spin, and it doesn’t have to go looking for pieces of data anywhere, so all those waiting times are cut down to effectively zero. Moreover, if you’re short on RAM, the system will try to create Virtual Memory by writing data to disk instead of RAM, which takes significantly longer. It normally takes the drive a few milliseconds to get ready to read/write the desired data and, worse than that, those milliseconds add up quickly as the drive gets filled, because it has to look for different pieces of data that are scattered across the drive’s surface, and that takes time. In old computers, the most frequent performance bottlenecks in day-to-day use are caused by having to wait for the hard drive. It’s absolutely true, followed closely by adding more RAM. Thanks! WhyĪsk around the Internet and most people will tell you that the single most important upgrade you can make to an old computer is an SSD. Also, the Amazon links in this article are affiliate links, so if you buy anything through one of those links, I’ll get a small kickback from Amazon. I followed the iFixit guide throughout the entire process and if you’re thinking of upgrading your own iMac, I suggest you do the same. Before I begin, please note that this article is not a how-to manual, and as such it should never replace the excellent step-by-step guides available on iFixit and elsewhere on the Internet. This is an account of how the upgrade went, the difficulties I found, and whether I recommend anyone do the same (Spoiler alert: yes, very much so). Set everything up in a comfortable environment and get to work! IntroductionĪ couple of weekends ago I finally had time for a project I’d been wanting to do for months: upgrading my iMac’s internal hard drive to an SSD. The rest of the article has been preserved in its original form for historical accuracy.

It’s a terrific machine and I have no plans to replace it anytime soon.

Prices vary slightly on Amazon but you can’t go wrong with any of these, so my advice would be to get whichever is cheaper at the moment.Įven though it will not be supported by the newly-announced macOS Sierra, my Early-2008 iMac is still my primary Mac. That said, keep in mind that in this case the bottleneck will be your iMac’s 3 Gb/s SATA 2 interface, so any of these drives will have nearly identical performance. If you want something fancier, both the Samsung 850 Pro and the SanDisk Extreme Pro are excellent, as well. The original text is still valid, but SSD recommendations are now outdated.Īs of July 2016, the consumer-grade SSD I recommend is the Samsung 850 EVO. Since then, it’s consistently been the most popular piece on this site almost every month. UPDATE, July 16, 2016: This article was originally published on May 21, 2014.

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