An old workhorse still doing its thing - late 2010 iMac

[elgrecomac]

In late 2010 I bought a 27" iMac with 1Tb of disk space and 8Gb of RAM. The computer was used at least 5 days a week since then. The only issue we had was with the DVI connector which was ultimately rectified. But the old iMac was slowing down so last year i bought an new MBP and I connect it to a 21" monitor when using the MBP as a desktop. So the iMac was not being used and I figured I give it away....but as a last ditch effort to find a useful purpose for old dependable, I decided to buy 16GB of RAM for it. Lo and behold...it works fine and is great for some music software i use (Bias FX 2) and as a TV (Youtube TV) in my office. I know the hard disk is going to crap out some day but getting 11+ useful years out of any electronic device is 'insanely great'. Bravo Apple!

 

[mdgm]

Get a FW800 SSD (e.g. from macsales.com) and clone the internal hard drive onto the SSD using SuperDuper. Then boot off the external SSD. Your machine will feel a lot faster.

I'm booting an early 2009 Mini off a FW800 SSD and it feels a lot faster to me. The one I got also has a USB3 port so when I retire the old Mac I can use it with newer ones.

I'm booting a 2011 iMac off TB3 NVMe SSDs which is much faster than FW800 again. Unfortunately the 2010 iMac doesn't have Thunderbolt so that's not an option for you.

 

[elgrecomac]

Get a FW800 SSD (e.g. from macsales.com) and clone the internal hard drive onto the SSD using SuperDuper. Then boot off the external SSD. Your machine will feel a lot faster.

I'm booting an early 2009 Mini off a FW800 SSD and it feels a lot faster to me. The one I got also has a USB3 port so when I retire the old Mac I can use it with newer ones.

I'm booting a 2011 iMac off TB3 NVMe SSDs which is much faster than FW800 again. Unfortunately the 2010 iMac doesn't have Thunderbolt so that's not an option for you.

Great suggestion. Thank you...I will order tonight.

 

[mdgm]

Opening up the machine would obviously be better than FW800 if you are comfortable with the risks of doing that, but FW800 is the next best thing.

For a machine feeling quicker the random IO improvement of an SSD is going to be noticed using FW800. Apps will launch a lot quicker etc. For large sequential IO (reading and writing large files) an internal SSD would be a lot better than FW800.

Large video files delete pretty much instantly for me using the FW800 boot SSD whereas deletion took a while using the internal hard drive.

SuperDuper (has some free functionality) and CarbonCopyCloner (has a 30 day free trial) create bootable clones. So it's the quickest way to get up and running on an external.