Help! SSD Upgrade for Late 2009 27" iMac Questions

[ccapman670]

I just bought a Crucial M550 256GB SSD that amazon had on sale for $90 last week to upgrade my iMac. I've been meaning too for a while, and have been searching and reading threads and guides about it but haven't quite pieced together everything. They all seem to answer something slightly different and I haven't found a guide that comprehensively includes everything from installation to cloning.

I have the 11,1 Quad Core i5 2.66. According to my research the optical drive and HDD are both Sata 2 which is 3 GB/s, I want to put the SSD in the optical drive and keep the 1TB where it is because it has firmware and a temp sensor and both spots will get same speed. In terms of installing the SSD I found a similar guide and I just have to use a caddy with the SSD, and can simply place the temp sensor from the optical drive onto the SSD?

What I was confused about was copying over my applications and OS to the SSD. Can I install it first and then once its installed use carbon copy to move those over, and then just select SSD as boot drive and delete the OS from the secondary 1TB HDD?

Or do I want to clone over the OS prior to installing it?

If anyone could give me some insight or message me it would be greatly appreciated.

I bought this caddy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005L94EAM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[Natzoo]

What I was confused about was copying over my applications and OS to the SSD. Can I install it first and then once its installed use carbon copy to move those over, and then just select SSD as boot drive and delete the OS from the secondary 1TB HDD?

Or do I want to clone over the OS prior to installing it?

If anyone could give me some insight or message me it would be greatly appreciated.

I bought this caddy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005L94EAM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

i would recommend to clone over to OS, but i don't know much about this. To make sure, make a thread on apple.

 

[dominicluk]

You can use Time Machine to load all OS ,file and setting into the new SSD, I just change my iMac early 2009 HD to SSD, no cloning required. ( but in my case, I replace the HDD with SSD )

 

[ssls6]

Funny, I just did the same thing this morning on my 11,1 iMac. I did not clone the OS first. I just installed the SSD in the optical bay slot then rebooted. Once booted, I formatted the SSD then cloned my OS over using carbon copy cloner (also cloned the recovery partition).

Now I rebooted then formatted the internal HHD for other uses. It has made a big difference in the performance of this machine. Even though the SSD is SataII, the IOPS of an SSD really help with Mavericks or Yosemite. They seem to have 10X the open files as snow leopard did for just normal operation.