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iMac AL 24" Hard Drive Swap - Pics/Procedure inside

o2sys said:
Is there room in the 24" iMac to have both the SSD + HDD while maintaining the optical drive?

This video shows a 27" and he mounts in behind the optical drive. Wondering if the 24 can do the same.
Click to expand...

Nope. The 24 inch only has one Sata port and no extra space. The optical drive is pata and to use the slot for a hard drive you need a pata to sata adapter. This is the setup I use. Just use an external optical drive.
 
lilB said:
Thats why I installed my ssd in the hard disk bay, and use a 2.5 hard disk in the optical drive bay.
Click to expand...

No, the way you did it was because the other way round doesn't work ;-) at least with most SSDs. Actually you wouldn't feel a bottleneck with OSX, as the bandwidth is irrelevant. The relevant numbers to look at are the random reads and writes. And these aren't limited by PATA at all (No insult meant :))

The point is that eg. SF drives at least with my iMAc8,1 didn't work at all in the optibay. Anyone else noticed this?

My choice was to get the SSD back on the SATA port, put a 2.5" disk into the optibay and everything is fine again. The critical fast main storage is FW800 right now. BUT, actually faster would be to have the SSD in an USB2.0 enclosure and the fast drive at the SATA port. Tried it before and it really is.

No I am looking for a way to have longer STAT cables in the iMac, get the SSD SATA installed at the place of the Optibay/DVD, turn the PATA cables 180° around an build in a WD Black the wrong way round into the space of the original 3.5". Did anyone try this before? SSDs are sometimes picky if messed up cables are used.
 
huskyte said:
No, the way you did it was because the other way round doesn't work ;-) at least with most SSDs. Actually you wouldn't feel a bottleneck with OSX, as the bandwidth is irrelevant. The relevant numbers to look at are the random reads and writes. And these aren't limited by PATA at all (No insult meant :))

The point is that eg. SF drives at least with my iMAc8,1 didn't work at all in the optibay. Anyone else noticed this?

My choice was to get the SSD back on the SATA port, put a 2.5" disk into the optibay and everything is fine again. The critical fast main storage is FW800 right now. BUT, actually faster would be to have the SSD in an USB2.0 enclosure and the fast drive at the SATA port. Tried it before and it really is.

No I am looking for a way to have longer STAT cables in the iMac, get the SSD SATA installed at the place of the Optibay/DVD, turn the PATA cables 180° around an build in a WD Black the wrong way round into the space of the original 3.5". Did anyone try this before? SSDs are sometimes picky if messed up cables are used.
Click to expand...

Might be possible with some custom brackets. There is no PATA cable, just a plug so you would need an adapter for that. Those WD Black drives throw off a bit of heat though and these Macs are allready running right near their thermal limits. My power supply dropped 10 degrees when I pulled the apple shipped WD Blue out of there (Apple custom firmware for noise and heat management too). The 2.5 inch WD black that I use gets a little hot but the whole right side of the iMac has its own fan and no components to cool so if anything it evens things out a little.

If noise and head don't bother you, try it. You just need to find the right cables. Don't forget to take pictures too.

If the storage limitation is an issue for you, your probably better off looking at some external storage options. FW800 is plenty fast for hard drives. You can easily run RAID over that bus too.

Another thing you can look at is using a sata port multiplier. I have seen one used with a Mac so I know its at least possible.
 
Michaelgtrusa said:
What about just using a external ssd?
Click to expand...

This setup works pretty well even over USB. Far, far faster than anything beside internal SSD as only random access counts. Well, if you are looking to host your video collection on the SSD you will demand higher sequential rates, but for the OS it is fine.
 
huskyte said:
This setup works pretty well even over USB. Far, far faster than anything beside internal SSD as only random access counts. Well, if you are looking to host your video collection on the SSD you will demand higher sequential rates, but for the OS it is fine.
Click to expand...

It might be worth investing in a FW800 enclosure for the SSD if you needed to keep it external... that would open up more bandwidth for you and FW generally performs better than USB 2.0 (even FW400, just a more efficient protocol)
 
lilB said:
Might be possible with some custom brackets. There is no PATA cable, just a plug so you would need an adapter for that. Those WD Black drives throw off a bit of heat though and these Macs are allready running right near their thermal limits. My power supply dropped 10 degrees when I pulled the apple shipped WD Blue out of there (Apple custom firmware for noise and heat management too). The 2.5 inch WD black that I use gets a little hot but the whole right side of the iMac has its own fan and no components to cool so if anything it evens things out a little.

If noise and head don't bother you, try it. You just need to find the right cables. Don't forget to take pictures too.

If the storage limitation is an issue for you, your probably better off looking at some external storage options. FW800 is plenty fast for hard drives. You can easily run RAID over that bus too.

Another thing you can look at is using a sata port multiplier. I have seen one used with a Mac so I know its at least possible.
Click to expand...

Actually you can do without a bracket if you customize an optibay. My guess is that the internals are so tiny that it wouldn't hurt to cut the rest of this bracket off.

I just had a liitle funny encounter with the WD Black. Might be OT, but it might apply as well: In an old WD MyBook enclosure, the grey one with FW800, the WD Black won't work. My guess is that it won't do SATAI or II (or negotiate for it), whatever is needed for the drives to work in there. all other drives work perfectly. Even with the jumper there is no chance to get it working. In some other forums it was mentioned that even WD doesn't know for sure which mode it enters with the jumper set (WD support). In an Lacie Box (needed to cut some holes in there for heat dissipation) it works flawlessly. Now, I haven't tested this drive with the unmodified optibay (just other 2.5" drives), but I wouldn't be to sure anymore that it works out of the box.

But anyway, you are probably right, the heat will state a problem. Btw I had a WD AAKS in my iMac and this one is prone to waste energy as hell... and was noisy.

I guess I will stick to having the Black in an USB enclosure as I don't want to invest any further into this machine. It might be the better option to go for a new 27" with SSD AND hdd. For Aperture the 24" lacks of GPU and CPU power and Ram is also limited.
 
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