Late 2009 iMac 27 inch upgraded
Thank you for this guide, I probably would not have attempted this upgrade without it.
I have installed the Samsung 830 into my Late 2009 iMac, which I gather is the same procedure / requirements as the 21.5 inch Late 2009 iMac but just has more room inside.
Before I started doing anything I gave the whole computer desk and area, and the iMac itself (once switched off and unplugged) a very good clean with a damp cloth, to remove all the dust that accumulates around the back where all my cables live (I have a lot of external stuff). It won't do the iMac any harm to wipe over the entire casing, even the screen, with a damp Jeyes cloth (the type that does not have any lint).
There were a few things I discovered, which have already been mentioned in this thread -
1/ The optical bay bracket for the SSD which is linked to in the original post was not a perfect fit for the black plastic Apple bracket that the optical drive was in, I sort of fudged the screws in at an angle and also had to make my own hole in the front (where the slot would have been) because the black plastic bracket had a notch which did not fit in any of the existing holes on the new SSD bracket. No problem really. Thinking about it, I probably should have just widened the screw holes on the black bracket, thus allowing the screws to be inserted slightly back a bit so that they fitted the SSD bracket holes. Nay matter, the SSD is a non-moving part so I doubt the screws are going anywhere, they are held in place by rubber grommets anyway.
2/ I needed a torch to see into the iMac while removing / attaching the screen cables. An LED torch is sufficient.
3/ There was an additional cable to remove on the right hand side (with the iMac on its back, iSight nearest me) which is not mentioned in the guide, so there were four in total.
I took the opportunity to dust while the screen was off. Using a horse hair brush with long bristles I had a gentle brushing and poking session, holding a vacuum cleaner nozzle nearby. There are no bits to suck up so don't be shy with it, just don't knock any of the small cables out, and it shouldn't be necessary to actually touch the boards with the nozzle, brushing should get any surface dust up. I paid particular attention to underneath where the optical drive had been and the two large heat sinks; the one on the right has a black fan unit next to it with a small gap, I saw lots of matted dust down there so shoved my long bristles in and gave it a good brush up and down while sucking with the nozzle, managed to extract all of the matted dust this way. There is black sponge at the bottom down there. I also cleaned the back of the screen before attempting to lift it off the towel.
After this dusting and vacuuming there was only minimal dust around, easily removed with a microfibre cloth. I had some canned air but I found that it sprayed a bit of liquid out initially so didn't like to use it, probably the gas that is mixed with the air to allow it to be compressed. This was (hopefully) easily wiped away with a microfibre cloth though. I have found that a bit of water and a microfibre cloth do an excellent job of leaving a clean surface behind, however I would not recommend mixing water with electronics; works great for the front screen glass (on the outside) once it is back in place though, to remove the suction cup shapes.
I booted up my iMac and it worked fine from the original HD (which I did not touch), told me that the SSD needed initialising, I used Disk Utility to format it for Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The iMac was on Lion 10.7.5 at this point.
I installed Mountain Lion from a USB thumb drive (which I had previously created using the App Store download / write your own USB install thumb drive method, documented elsewhere) by holding C while booting and choosing the SSD as the install location, worked a treat, rebooted fine as a shiny new install. The old hard drive is no longer the Startup disk so just sits there as an extra internal drive, mounts by default. I installed some Apple updates and all seems to be working fine, rebooted several times during the updates with no problems.
My Time Machine drive was picked up fine, though it marks my Documents etc as empty during the first backup, all my previous backups from the original hard drive are still there and can be restored in the usual way. I became rather glad of Apple's iCloud storage too for things like Mail, Calendar, and Bookmarks which all came in automatically for me.
So, Late 2009 iMac 27 inch has no problem with the Samsung 830 SSD (so far). I have 16GB RAM from Crucial (as recommended by their advisor tool), so there's another one for anyone wondering about RAM upgrade problems - trust Crucial.
) but the prices are insane (especially since most sellers selling Apple parts have 3-5x more expensive shipping rates than what 'normal' US sellers use).
