24" Early 2009 Imac and SSD - Lightroom/Itunes

[jamin100]

Hey guys 'n' girls!

My early 2009 24" 2.66ghz imac is starting to show its age and slowing down a bit now but I cant afford to replace it with a newer machine just yet so looking to have a bit of an upgrade.

I have already upgraded the machine to 8GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive and am now looking to replace the optical drive with an SSD.

I mainly use the machine for storing my itunes library (about 500GB), lightroom 4 and general web browsing etc.

Now, I do have a HP Microserver that I could move the itunes library onto and run itunes from there but im not sure yet.

Anyway. The plan is to have Lion and the applications on the SSD and the media on the 1TB drive.

So, my questions are.

1. SATA 2 or 3 - The price of SSD's is really falling here in the UK is it worth getting a SATA 2 or 3 SSD considering that the optical drive port is only 3Gbps?

2. Do i need a optibay (clone) or can I just use some velcro and a small sata cable?

3. all the optibay clones on ebay state that there are for macbook pros' etc. Will these be the same for the imac or is there a special type?

4. TRIM - Do i need this? Ive noticed that some SSD's have trim support and some dont. What do you think?

5. My Imac is left on (sleeping) 24/7 will a SS upgrade benefit me? Im mainly seeing slow downs doing edits in lightroom and especially when waking the computer up from sleep..

Thanks in advance

 

[bvanlieu]

Hey guys 'n' girls!

My early 2009 24" 2.66ghz imac is starting to show its age and slowing down a bit now but I cant afford to replace it with a newer machine just yet so looking to have a bit of an upgrade.

I have already upgraded the machine to 8GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive and am now looking to replace the optical drive with an SSD.

I mainly use the machine for storing my itunes library (about 500GB), lightroom 4 and general web browsing etc.

Now, I do have a HP Microserver that I could move the itunes library onto and run itunes from there but im not sure yet.

Anyway. The plan is to have Lion and the applications on the SSD and the media on the 1TB drive.

So, my questions are.

1. SATA 2 or 3 - The price of SSD's is really falling here in the UK is it worth getting a SATA 2 or 3 SSD considering that the optical drive port is only 3Gbps?

2. Do i need a optibay (clone) or can I just use some velcro and a small sata cable?

3. all the optibay clones on ebay state that there are for macbook pros' etc. Will these be the same for the imac or is there a special type?

4. TRIM - Do i need this? Ive noticed that some SSD's have trim support and some dont. What do you think?

5. My Imac is left on (sleeping) 24/7 will a SS upgrade benefit me? Im mainly seeing slow downs doing edits in lightroom and especially when waking the computer up from sleep..

Thanks in advance

Prices being similar, SATA3 is the way to go. You could move it in the future. I run a 3 drive in a 2 MBP with no issues.

TRIM is not required...I never have enabled it. Some of it depends on your use patterns. If you find performance decreasing, you can fire up TRIM enable, then disable it after it does its thing.

For waking from sleep, if you have set your system to write to disk (default on laptops, not default on imacs), then contents of RAM read from disk will be significantly faster.

- b

 

[jamin100]

For waking from sleep, if you have set your system to write to disk (default on laptops, not default on imacs), then contents of RAM read from disk will be significantly faster.

- b

Thanks,

Where do I enable write to disk? Cant see it in energy saver?

I let my imac spin down the disks when possible

 

[jamin100]

Any idea if this optibay clone will work in my imac?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2nd-HDD-S...losures_RL&hash=item45fcf72b91#ht_4860wt_1130

 

[jamin100]

anyone else?