Hard disks setup ideas for 27" 2011 imac

Frankly, you are brave to be planning to do this. You should read this article first, and you should read the article it references at OWC. Replacing hard drives in an iMac is not for the inexperienced, especially as it voids your warranty unless done by an Apple authorized repair centre. Note the problems with replacement hard drives and thermal sensors in the 2011 iMacs. Do you realize how little space there is inside an iMac?

If you still want to try this, best of luck, but I wouldn't.

Whats the goal in adding the slower and smaller Momentus XTs again?

You have each OS on the SSD, so the XTs are just going to be used for storage?

Im sure you realize The tiny 4 GB of flash memory on the XT doesnt work like/as fast as a traditional SSD, right? Its supposed to be used as a system drive, not a storage drive...

88 King said:

The removal of the glass and LCD does not look too difficult, and the hard drive swap is very straight forward. My main worries are that the hard drive fan will spin at maximum and I'll end up trap dusts between LCD and glass.


I want to mount two 2.5 inch drives in place of the stock 3.5 inch drive. This because I want to keep programs and files separate between the two operation systems.

I'm hoping that the flash memory on the Momentus XT will cache my most used programs and files, therefore make it much fast at reading data than the stock HD. Also it will operate quieter than the standard HD.

Plus 2 500 Gb Momentus XT drives gives me 4 times the space at only half the price of a good 256Gb SSD.

Click to expand...

You could just leave the standard 1TB hard drive in there and partition it in two 500GB sections. Anything that would benefit from the extra flash memory in the Momentus XTs should already be on the SSD anyhow. There are also not that many SATA cables in the iMac, so you would run into issues there.

You are really trying to make the iMac do something its not designed to do.

From everything I have read, the XT only caches if those are on the system drive, not plain storage drives.

And again, comparing an XT to a SSD is not applicable. XTs are *barely* faster in straight speed than other 7200 RPM 2.5" drives. They might be quieter, they might not. Unless you are unlucky enough to get a loud drive in your iMac, odds are very much in your favor that you end up with a nice quiet drive.

Oh, and FWIW, removal of the glass is the *easiest* part of the whole disassembly. takes 5 secondss.

Sounds like you arent exactly clear on how OS X treats Windblows when installing via Bootcamp? it automatically creates a partition for you and lets you size it right from the get go. Im assuming you only want windblows to game on? Right? so thats a lot of booting/rebooting. ugh. Take the $200 that you were going to spend on the XTs and sell your current SSD for $100 -- that $300 puts you close to a nice 256 gig SSD. Skip the 6G SSD and go with a 3G. Still plenty fast.

As others have said, this is not a great plan. I have two alternatives.

1. Return the iMac and order one with a factory installed SSD. If that's what you want, your time, effort and potential failure aren't worth the risk. I've also read very mixed things about the hybrid drives.

2. Get an external SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and use that as a system drive. It should be just as fast as an internal SSD. (Faster?)