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mackie8

Suspended
Original poster
Nov 6, 2014
898
663
is it possible to change this to SSD?
im finding it a bit slow now.. after having some ssd laptops... now i notice my imac ... slower than my
mac air 11 2015 haha..
im still running yosemite on my imac i dunno if el captain will make a speed improvement ...

my hdd is still having 500gb free ...

imac specs:
i5 2.7/8gb ram/1tb hdd
 
Of course its possible, the question comes to how difficult will it be to crack open a 2012 iMac and from iFixit's tear down it appears to be fairly difficult. Like the current models, that iMac appears to be sealed/glued together and getting access to the innards may prove problematic.
 
Can i use external ssd? How transfer boot up to external?
You'd want to use a Thunderbolt interface because you'll not really benefit too much using USB. Just use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the internal drive to the external, and when you boot the computer you can keep the option key depressed and that will give a screen to choose the boot device.

I believe it should also show up in the startup drive preference in the system preferences, but I'm not totally sure about that since its an external drive.
 
It is trivially-easy to boot and run your iMac from an external drive, and will save you time, money and trouble from having to open it up to replace the internal drive.

If the 2012 iMac has USB3, use that instead of thunderbolt to boot the iMac.

It will cost FAR less than thunderbolt and you'll get boot and run speeds that are nearly equal -- probably not perceivable from a user-standpoint.

You can either buy a "bare" SSD, and then put it into a USB3 enclosure of your choice, or you can buy one "ready to go" such as this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00ZTRY532?tag=delt-20

Once you have the drive, initialize it with Disk Utility.

Then, use CarbonCopyCloner to "clone" the contents of the internal HDD to the new external SSD.
CCC will even clone the recovery partition if you have one.
If you don't have CCC, it is FREE to download and FREE to use for the first 30 days.

Again, all of this is EASY.
Just do things step-by-step.

You will be AMAZED at the performance increase.
 
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