Do they even make SATA II 3GB/S drives anymore? all the ones I have found are advertised as 6GB/S.
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iMac 27" hard drive finally died
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Do they even make SATA II 3GB/S drives anymore? all the ones I have found are advertised as 6GB/S.
The only ones I see are the OWC drives sold by macsales.com and on Amazon. Those are the ones I just corrupted. I am 90% sure the data doubler was causing my problems. I just got my third drive but will have to wait a week before I get the replacement data doubler. I have to suffer through the whole RMA process.
The whole problem with SATA III has to do with certain controllers not playing nice with the old iMac. I haven't seen any real proof that the latest controllers used by Samsung have this problem. So I am giving it a try. Once I get the new part I will be able tell pretty quickly what the negotiated SATA speed is.
Fishrrman
macrumors Nehalem
orindabiker wrote above:
[[ I would like to upgrade to a 1TB SSD drive, but have some questions:]]
...
[[ Is putting around $800 in this machine worth it? ]]
In my opinion, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
The iMac you have is now 6 years old.
If you've got $800 to spend, put that towards a NEW iMac (or an Apple-refurbished model).
If you WOULD like to improve its performance without spending too much money, I'd suggest getting an SSD in the 240gb range ($100), and putting that into a firewire800 enclosure (about $50). Put a copy of the OS on it, your apps and accounts (but keep large aggregations of movies, music and pictures on the internal HDD).
No, it WON'T be as fast as having an SSD mounted internally. But it will keep you going a couple more years for a minimum expenditure.
[[ I would like to upgrade to a 1TB SSD drive, but have some questions:]]
...
[[ Is putting around $800 in this machine worth it? ]]
In my opinion, ABSOLUTELY NOT.
The iMac you have is now 6 years old.
If you've got $800 to spend, put that towards a NEW iMac (or an Apple-refurbished model).
If you WOULD like to improve its performance without spending too much money, I'd suggest getting an SSD in the 240gb range ($100), and putting that into a firewire800 enclosure (about $50). Put a copy of the OS on it, your apps and accounts (but keep large aggregations of movies, music and pictures on the internal HDD).
No, it WON'T be as fast as having an SSD mounted internally. But it will keep you going a couple more years for a minimum expenditure.
You what?
A 6Gbps drive connected to a 3Gbps port will run at 3Gbps, not 1.5Gbps. Please don't spread such nonsense.
Unless there is some random chipset compatibility issue, which with the iMacs I'm not aware of, the negotiated link speed will be the lower of the chipset speed and drive speed. It won't just "miss out" the 3Gbps link speed.
ssls6
macrumors 6502a
I put a 500GB 840 evo Sata3 drive in my late 2009 iMac and it is running at Sata2 speeds. Verified by blackmagic. I used the optical drive bay.
It's not a hard job but it helps to have good lighting and you need good eyesight or corrected eyesight for those darn small LSD cables.
OK, interesting perspective.
Having been a long-time Mac user, it feels like the internal HDD is nearing end of life, so I feel like I have to crack the unit open to replace it. Since I'm doing that anyway, would you still make your recommendation, or would you recommend something different?
Also, do you think it worthwhile at all to upgrade the 8GB RAM for 16GB...or just let that go and save the money?
Please give me some more details about your advice.....which I appreciate.
Thanks.
SaSaSushi
macrumors 601
Putting an SSD in that machine would give it a new life. As previously mentioned, don't waste time (and money) with a Firewire 800 enclosure.
If I still had my Late 2009, I'd swap out the optical drive for a 250GB SSD and boot from that. Then I'd swap the failed HD with a new WD Green 3TB HDD for storage. $220 total. It's a no-brainer.
Is your memory pressure high (Activity Monitor > Memory)? More RAM can't hurt but it all depends on your needs. I had 32GB in my Late 2009 (the CTO core i7 model supported it unofficially), but I run a lot of VMs.
If you take your time and follow the step by step on iFixit, the job is simple.
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Ok so I am going to purchase a 500GB SSD maybe this one:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT5...F8&qid=1424120727&sr=8-2&keywords=crucial+SSD
The trouble is that we have our backup on a Time capsule. and I can view it from my Macbook and it is 715GB. We do not have the original install disks for the iMac either 🙁 (we have had 4 house moves in the time we have had the iMac!)
1. How do we get an OS on the new disk?
2. The only docs we are concerned about on the Time capsule are the photos and documents. everything else is not that important. And to be honest everything is in such a mess after 6 years that we would rather start afresh.
What is the best approach here? the original hard disk is dead so not accessible.
Thanks.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT5...F8&qid=1424120727&sr=8-2&keywords=crucial+SSD
The trouble is that we have our backup on a Time capsule. and I can view it from my Macbook and it is 715GB. We do not have the original install disks for the iMac either 🙁 (we have had 4 house moves in the time we have had the iMac!)
1. How do we get an OS on the new disk?
2. The only docs we are concerned about on the Time capsule are the photos and documents. everything else is not that important. And to be honest everything is in such a mess after 6 years that we would rather start afresh.
What is the best approach here? the original hard disk is dead so not accessible.
Thanks.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Upgrading old mac
Hello all,
I agree the SSD upgrade is worth it. Personally, I let OWC upgrade me big time with 2x 480GB SSDs and yes, it is only SATAII since i have the iMac mid-2010 but this machine is fully beefed up so it is worth it to me. All the more that I plan to strip them in RAID 0 and reach (in theory) 560GB/s sustained throughput, something not even all mordern SSDs do. Thru some experience I know the soft RAID of Mac OS is very fast. I just hope I can indeed boot on such a drive, but I believe yes. With a 2.97GHz quad code i7 and 32GB RAM (yes it works, 4x 8GB), I think it is totally worth it. (wish it was retina though). I need to shell out at least twice as much for any new Mac that will perform half as fast. Of course the proof is in the pudding and so if you are interested I'll post back when I get my Mac back, with my impressions and some Black Magic numbers to chew on.
I cannot speak for doing it yourself as I chose to let a company do it.
However I have a comment on something that I read here: some posters disqualify using an SSD over FW800 as some other posters proposed to the OP. I would NOT disqualify this and certainly recommend it as a valid alternative if you want something that works today, for cheap, and based on my experience the performance can be very good. Here's the story: As I am transitioning how I manage my data I happen to have worked on my large Aperture library (35k images) with many large RAW files (25MB a pop) over USB2.0 with a top notch SSD (850PRO 1TB), while Mac OS and Aperture were on the stock 2TB HDD before my SSD upgrade. This was obviously a (temporary) ridiculous setup, but felt MUCH FASTER that working all on the stock HDD. Even over USB2.0 with is half as fast as FW800. Here's my theory: the bus throughput matters a lot if you transfer large amounts at once. In my setup, the speed came from ultra fast data access with limited size data transfers (images loaded one by one, and Aperture library is millions of very small files). In real life, this covers most applications but the heaviest ones. For this reason an SSD over FW800 will still be a night & day improvement over an old HDD to any old Mac user. It is cheap and can be done today without opening your mac or shipping it to someone. So it is a valid choice IMHO.
Give me heat if you disagree 🙂 but we all easily agree that a SSD has a place somewhere (inside and/or out) our old macs 🙂
Personally I'm doing both as my mac upgrade includes an eSATA port to use my top notch SSD with the fastest port that old mac has (and yes, with faster ports on another newer mac too, the whole point of my setup is to easily have my data with me across more than one mac).
Cheers,
Davy
Hello all,
I agree the SSD upgrade is worth it. Personally, I let OWC upgrade me big time with 2x 480GB SSDs and yes, it is only SATAII since i have the iMac mid-2010 but this machine is fully beefed up so it is worth it to me. All the more that I plan to strip them in RAID 0 and reach (in theory) 560GB/s sustained throughput, something not even all mordern SSDs do. Thru some experience I know the soft RAID of Mac OS is very fast. I just hope I can indeed boot on such a drive, but I believe yes. With a 2.97GHz quad code i7 and 32GB RAM (yes it works, 4x 8GB), I think it is totally worth it. (wish it was retina though). I need to shell out at least twice as much for any new Mac that will perform half as fast. Of course the proof is in the pudding and so if you are interested I'll post back when I get my Mac back, with my impressions and some Black Magic numbers to chew on.
I cannot speak for doing it yourself as I chose to let a company do it.
However I have a comment on something that I read here: some posters disqualify using an SSD over FW800 as some other posters proposed to the OP. I would NOT disqualify this and certainly recommend it as a valid alternative if you want something that works today, for cheap, and based on my experience the performance can be very good. Here's the story: As I am transitioning how I manage my data I happen to have worked on my large Aperture library (35k images) with many large RAW files (25MB a pop) over USB2.0 with a top notch SSD (850PRO 1TB), while Mac OS and Aperture were on the stock 2TB HDD before my SSD upgrade. This was obviously a (temporary) ridiculous setup, but felt MUCH FASTER that working all on the stock HDD. Even over USB2.0 with is half as fast as FW800. Here's my theory: the bus throughput matters a lot if you transfer large amounts at once. In my setup, the speed came from ultra fast data access with limited size data transfers (images loaded one by one, and Aperture library is millions of very small files). In real life, this covers most applications but the heaviest ones. For this reason an SSD over FW800 will still be a night & day improvement over an old HDD to any old Mac user. It is cheap and can be done today without opening your mac or shipping it to someone. So it is a valid choice IMHO.
Give me heat if you disagree 🙂 but we all easily agree that a SSD has a place somewhere (inside and/or out) our old macs 🙂
Personally I'm doing both as my mac upgrade includes an eSATA port to use my top notch SSD with the fastest port that old mac has (and yes, with faster ports on another newer mac too, the whole point of my setup is to easily have my data with me across more than one mac).
Cheers,
Davy
SaSaSushi
macrumors 601
If the Late 2009 iMac had eSATA or Thunderbolt ports, I would not be advising against using an SSD in an external enclosure. After all, I boot my own Late 2013 iMac from a Samsung 840 EVO in a Thunderbolt enclosure, in spite of the machine having a Fusion drive.
Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 are a different matter. I do consider it a waste of money to invest in an enclosure that will end up considerably throttling the speed of the drive when all one needs to do is open up the Mac and connect it internally for maximum speed.
Indeed. The iMac 27 mid-2010 has 3 total internal SATA ports, so part of the upgrade I'm doing consists of exposing one of them as an outside accessible eSATA port (SATAII), hence possible external performance. Yes, FW800 is left behind by SATA even in revision II.
My experience was with USB2.0 but FW800 will be faster and I was simply making the point that not all benefit is lost if you throttle the bandwidth yet retain blazing fast access times that, in my opinion & experience listed, and when applied to not-too-heavy use, provides clear benefit. But other than that yeah I don't like wasting money either. BTW what TB enclosure are you happy with? Cause I tried a $200 one and returned it as it was throttling me to about 385 Mbps with that SSD I mentioned.
SaSaSushi
macrumors 601
Yes there are known chipset compatibility problems. However I haven't found a definitive guide to all the combinations that work and don't work.
Help!
So I replaced the hard drive with the SSD and although the cables were more fiddly than I thought. I thought i did it all correctly.
But... when we boot up all we get is the grey screen with a flashing hard drive symbol with a question mark in it. I have done a search and done all sorts of pram + SMC resets etc but nothing comes up except this symbol.
Likely cause?
So I replaced the hard drive with the SSD and although the cables were more fiddly than I thought. I thought i did it all correctly.
But... when we boot up all we get is the grey screen with a flashing hard drive symbol with a question mark in it. I have done a search and done all sorts of pram + SMC resets etc but nothing comes up except this symbol.
Likely cause?
Update:I plugged an old mac hard drive in the USB port and I can now boot into that hard drive, going into disk utility I can see the new SSD and partition it etc
But I can't see how to access the Bios to recover from Time machine or to get a bootable OS on the new drive. We have an old Snow leopard recovery cd but it will not boot from that either.
But I can't see how to access the Bios to recover from Time machine or to get a bootable OS on the new drive. We have an old Snow leopard recovery cd but it will not boot from that either.
Ok panic over for now.
We have now managed to get into the Recovery mode and started up the restore from Time capsule. we are doing this over Wifi which is not ideal but my wife started the process off and is reluctant to attach a physical cable now it is doing its stuff.
This could be a long process! 440 gb to go!
We have now managed to get into the Recovery mode and started up the restore from Time capsule. we are doing this over Wifi which is not ideal but my wife started the process off and is reluctant to attach a physical cable now it is doing its stuff.
This could be a long process! 440 gb to go!
Final update on my install. Got a new Samsung 850 EVO SSD. Got a new data doubler. I confirmed the SSD was good by using it in an external enclosure. Installed everything into the optical drive slot. Same result. No reliable reads or writes to the drive. Seems that the SATA bus (or cable) just won't support the speeds. I did confirm that the Samsung 850 EVO does negotiate the proper speed. In the end I put everything back to normal and returned all the parts. My system is at least much faster from the hard drive install plus the clean OS install. So it is operating like new again and can give me another 5 years.
matreya
macrumors 65816
Did you try connecting the SSD to the hard drive SATA port rather than the optical drive port?