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Imac 8,1 upgrade HDD,SDD

M

Major.Robto

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 11, 2012
286
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I have a 2008 Imac and I would like to upgrade the internal Hard-drive to a 2tb and get a SSD drive.

I have the 2tb drive and a external cace of the old one lined up. (I know its sata so im good there)

Now I am looking at taking out the disk drive and replacing it with a SSD
But I herd that the Imac I have only has IDE as the Optical drive buss. So would I lose peformace from the SSD but would it still be faster then a HDD? thats what im mainly after.

So what kind of adaptor would I be looking at to have something in the disk drive bay?
http://www.powerbookmedic.com/DualDrive---Add-a-Second-Hard-Drive-to-your-Laptop-p-17316.html

Is that the right kind of thing for the Imac? even though it says its for the laptops? I know my macbook 4,1 is quite close to the imac 8,1 because they came out in the same year.

I would also like to keep the disk drive and make it an external drive what would I use for that to make it usb.

OR should I look at putting the SSD where the hard drive is and get a adaptor for the disk drive and a 1tb drive where it lives.

I found a store where they have offered to do the whole upgrade for me for about 70$ so I can't break the system its self. Just because apple is super nuts on non user upgrade parts.
 
Bump almost 400 views and not a single person had posted..... Well I'd atleast expect a You can't do that.. kind of post.
 
If you want to go that route and install the SSD where your optical drive is, the adaptor you linked to seems to be the correct one (external connection PATA, internal SATA).

If I were in your shoes, however, I'd leave the optical drive alone. The bandwidth of the PATA bus it's connected to is only 100MB/s, which would pretty much destroy at least part of the benefit an SSD would give you.

You'd better replace the internal HDD with an SSD big enough to hold your system/apps and all the data you use regularly. Then use any empty USB2.0 or FireWire800 (faster but more expensive; FW400 will still be faster than USB2.0) enclosure for 3.5" HDDs for the formerly internal drive.
 
I was thinking about useing a SSD thats around 240GB,

Well, I don't use the disk drive that much and I would perfer less clutter on my desk.


Should I put the SSD where the hard drive is instead and then put a 1tb laptop drive in the bracket and do that instead? because a hardrive will not lose much peformace then.


From my understanding of the SSD im looking at its not much of a loss if I put it on a ide buss
 
Major.Robto said:
Should I put the SSD where the hard drive is instead and then put a 1tb laptop drive in the bracket and do that instead? because a hardrive will not lose much peformace then.
Click to expand...

That's a good idea.

Major.Robto said:
From my understanding of the SSD im looking at its not much of a loss if I put it on a ide buss
Click to expand...

Choose a faster SSD then. :) As I said, the optical drive bus of your Mac has a maximum theoretical throughput of 100MB/s. It will be less in real life. Any SSD should be way faster than that.
You're not restricted to SATA2 SSDs, SATA3 SSDs will work as well. The maximum theoretical throughput of your SATA2 connection is 375MB/s, that means at least 300MB/s in real life.

Just get an SSD, SATA2 (3GBit/s) or SATA3 (6GBit/s), the size you need and with at least 300MB/s throughput to get the most out of your setup.
 
I guess I'll do that then. Plus a data drive for the imac. would be for my user folder. now I don't need that getting to big so I guess 1tb is better because of time cap.. I guess.


Now how would I go about puting the user folder on another drive under lion..... Man I love how osx has cat names. Always scares my non tech friends and family
 
If you want your home folder on the separate drive anyway, you won't need a 240GB SSD. 120GB is probably more than enough.

There are numerous guides on how to move your home folder to a separate drive. Try googling "site:forums.macrumors.com home folder separate drive" to search these forums.
 
Well, I was reading up on that and it advised aganst it. I guess I could just tell my Itunes,Imovie,Iphoto,Chrome, to point to the other drive. Sounds like the better bet.

I just have way to much music to store on the SSD almost 60gigs,
Imovie \ FCPX well I might edit on the SSD but then after im done move it to the HDD
Iphoto i might leave on the SSD Idk yet, 2 gigs


Chrome \ transmission\utorrent I can defently leave on the hdd, because well to much data I download.

okay thanks man for letimg me know it should work. I will try to post when I can if it was a success or not.
 
Yeah, it's a bit safer to leave things the way they are. That's what I do, too.

The upgrade isn't all that hard to perform. The key is patience and to sort the screws properly so you don't mix them up when putting everything back together.
 
Yeah, I plan to use a egg carton to put them in and number what step it was for with the Ifix it guide I found... I did find a guy in montreal that said for 50 bucks he would do it and he is apple certified.

I know my macbook is misisng a few scrues when I went to replace the display... Man that was a anoying....
 
Yeah thats what I though, they guy said that would take two hours and he charges 30bucks to start first hour and 20 for ever hour after.
 
im going to have to put the upgrades on hold,

My macbook is acting out, and having GPU problems. I have no clue if its 10.7 related or if its the GPU dying.


sigh....
 
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