iMac Late 2013 SSD Upgrade - Worth it?

[OwenLentz]

Rather than pry the iMac open, get an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD.

It can be 1tb, or might even be 512gb (check to see how much space your parents have actually used).

Many are available, I'd suggest the Samsung t7 "Shield". I bought one a few weeks' back and it's very nice (fast, too).

Format the external SSD to APFS, GUID partition format.

Then use either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner (both are FREE to use for 30 days, this will cost you nothing) to "clone" the contents of the iMac's internal drive to the SSD.

Now, go to the startup disk preference pane and set the SSD to be "the new boot drive".

I -guarantee- (yes, I'm THAT confident) that both you and your parents will be quite pleased with the speed-up.

This will carry them over until the m2/m3 iMac is released.
And when it DOES arrive, the external SSD will make it easy to "migrate their stuff over".
Just connect to the new one and "go". (Although you might want to exclude applications from the initial migration, as a good number of the ones they use -might- require updating).

And once migrated, the external SSD can now become the backup for the iMac's INTERNAL SSD...

Ive noticed you have posted about this multiple times for external vs internal ssd upgrade. Was hoping for a little more help/insight. Guys at best buy and micro center did not think it would work for my needs. They didn't seem to think even a internal upgrade is possible,so I took it with a grain of salt. Micro center guy said my iMac only has USB2? (how does one know?) and external would be slow.

My iMac

Catalina 10.15.7

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1 GB
D25MM0XDF8J9

I use it for general browsing, I work on my own wordpress website, and I use adobe photoshop, illustrator and do some video editing work.

My current system has 3 tb storage (after cleaning, Ive only used 1tb)

I'm ok with opening up my iMac if I have to.

Based on the info what are your recommendations.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Ive noticed you have posted about this multiple times for external vs internal ssd upgrade. Was hoping for a little more help/insight. Guys at best buy and micro center did not think it would work for my needs. They didn't seem to think even a internal upgrade is possible,so I took it with a grain of salt. Micro center guy said my iMac only has USB2? (how does one know?) and external would be slow.

My iMac

Catalina 10.15.7

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1 GB
D25MM0XDF8J9

I use it for general browsing, I work on my own wordpress website, and I use adobe photoshop, illustrator and do some video editing work.

My current system has 3 tb storage (after cleaning, Ive only used 1tb)

I'm ok with opening up my iMac if I have to.

Based on the info what are your recommendations.

Your Micro Center guy was mis-informed. iMac 2013 has 4 USB 3.0 ports.
You know it simply by reading the info provided by Apple.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

support.apple.com

And if you have to rely on some Micro center guy or Best buy guy to know about your iMac, I suggest you DO NOT open your iMac to try anything. I've seen enough iMac 2013 with broken glass because of first-timers' attempts.

Strictly follow Fishrrman guideline is the safest way for your case.

 

[OwenLentz]

Your Micro Center guy was mis-informed. iMac 2013 has 4 USB 3.0 ports.
You know it simply by reading the info provided by Apple.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

support.apple.com

And if you have to rely on some Micro center guy or Best buy guy to know about your iMac, I suggest you DO NOT open your iMac to try anything. I've seen enough iMac 2013 with broken glass because of first-timers' attempts.

Strictly follow Fishrrman guideline is the safest way for your case.

Thanks for your reply, based on my requirements, any suggestion on what size Samsung t7 "Shield" to purchase? I have a 2 additional external drives now, as I originally assumed it was a storage issue. I have plenty of additional storage. Can I get away with 1 tb?

 

[kagharaht]

I did this with my late 2013 iMac 21.5, Catalina (Max OS it can run). It was like night and day. I followed Fishrrman instructions and it works great. The only time I had to stop doing this was the external USB ports on the old Mac was giving me trouble and dismounting the drives attached to it and kernel panics. It is a 10 year old machine that was never turned off. Anyway go for it, it works great!

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Thanks for your reply, based on my requirements, any suggestion on what size Samsung t7 "Shield" to purchase? I have a 2 additional external drives now, as I originally assumed it was a storage issue. I have plenty of additional storage. Can I get away with 1 tb?

I would say 1TB is a decent amount of high speed storage.
But a separated enclosure + 1tb SSD sound better to me. For external SSD built this way, you can choose the legacy SATA SSD or future-proof nVME SSD, nVME SSD is quite convenient when you change your Mac, as its speed might increase when you change the cable. (USB 3.0 to USB 3.1/3.2 for instance)

 

[EugW]

Thanks for your reply, based on my requirements, any suggestion on what size Samsung t7 "Shield" to purchase? I have a 2 additional external drives now, as I originally assumed it was a storage issue. I have plenty of additional storage. Can I get away with 1 tb?

If you are using 1 TB and are going to get an external USB 3 SSD, then just get a 2 TB external SSD, since the incremental cost over 1 TB isn't huge, and drives work best when they have some additional free space. That also provides you with room to grow.

Be aware though that USB 3 external drives can sometimes slow down with continuous usage. Also, macOS does not support TRIM on external USB drives, although these days that might not be a big deal, at least with APFS formatted drives.

According to this Tom's Hardware review, some decent options for extended data transfers would be:

Crucial X10 Pro (2 TB)
Crucial X9 Pro (2 TB)
Samsung T7 Shield (2 TB)

The Kingston and Sabrent drives in this review all suck.

 

[rampancy]

Ive noticed you have posted about this multiple times for external vs internal ssd upgrade. Was hoping for a little more help/insight. Guys at best buy and micro center did not think it would work for my needs. They didn't seem to think even a internal upgrade is possible,so I took it with a grain of salt. Micro center guy said my iMac only has USB2? (how does one know?) and external would be slow.

My iMac

Catalina 10.15.7

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1 GB
D25MM0XDF8J9

I use it for general browsing, I work on my own wordpress website, and I use adobe photoshop, illustrator and do some video editing work.

My current system has 3 tb storage (after cleaning, Ive only used 1tb)

I'm ok with opening up my iMac if I have to.

Based on the info what are your recommendations.

My first recommendation is to not go to Best Buy or MicroCentre for your Mac upgrade needs...

Second, taking a trip to everymac (or your System Information app, or MacTracker) will show you that yes, your iMac does have USB 3.

Next, as someone using a Late-2013 iMac with a dying internal HDD and an external SSD (1 TB Samsung T7 Shield) as a daily driver, I can confidently say that using an external USB 3 SSD with a Late-2013 iMac as a boot drive and external storage has worked out great for me.

I would have just opened up the iMac to replace the internal drive but I don't have the time or energy to deal with (and likely replace) the internal display adhesive strips.

 

[OwenLentz]

Your Micro Center guy was mis-informed. iMac 2013 has 4 USB 3.0 ports.
You know it simply by reading the info provided by Apple.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

support.apple.com

And if you have to rely on some Micro center guy or Best buy guy to know about your iMac, I suggest you DO NOT open your iMac to try anything. I've seen enough iMac 2013 with broken glass because of first-timers' attempts.

Strictly follow Fishrrman guideline is the safest way for your case.

Hi, I have followed Fishermans steps as strictly. Format the external SSD to APFS, GUID partition format. But when it comes to the option to clone I only see options like copy etc. I tried back up all files, after 16 hours I stopped. Any help?

 

[EugW]

I gave up on SuperDuper! clones years ago. They don’t seem to work with the latest OSes, at least for me.

 

[rampancy]

Hi, I have followed Fishermans steps as strictly. Format the external SSD to APFS, GUID partition format. But when it comes to the option to clone I only see options like copy etc. I tried back up all files, after 16 hours I stopped. Any help?

"Backup - All Files" will create a clone of your boot drive to your external drive. That's the one you should select. And it's going to take a very long time since it will copy everything to the drive, including the recovery partition.

If you still find using SuperDuper difficult, you could also use Carbon Copy Cloner too.

 

[Fishrrman]

Owen:

Looking at your reply 33 above, the image on the left is "what you want". All set to proceed.

HOWEVER:
Your internal iMac drive is 3tb.
Your external SSD is 1tb.

How much data is on the internal drive?
If it's more than, say, 975gb, you may have problems.

 

[OwenLentz]

Owen:

Looking at your reply 33 above, the image on the left is "what you want". All set to proceed.

HOWEVER:
Your internal iMac drive is 3tb.
Your external SSD is 1tb.

How much data is on the internal drive?
If it's more than, say, 975gb, you may have problems.

Attached are my hard drive, and finally the copied files onto the samsung t7. I followed the steps of Now, go to the startup disk preference pane and set the SSD to be "the new boot drive".

Seems its the same as before? I tried black magic speed test, doesn't seem to have changed? Actually seems slower? Have I missed a step? The faster of the two is the internal, the slower didn't even crack 6mb's, just froze

 

[Fishrrman]

Owen --

Try the free "AJA System Test Lite" from the Apple Store:

‎AJA System Test Lite

‎AJA System Test Lite is a great way to test a storage system with a real world speed test. Designed with digital video production and post production needs in mind, it emulates the writing and reading of video files to and from a hard disk and displays the results in a simple, easy to read...

apps.apple.com

IMPORTANT:
Make sure you go to the area labeled "Target Disk" and select your external SSD as the "source drive". See the image below.

Try this and let us know what you get.
If you get a poor result, check the cable.
A USB3 cable has "blue tips" on the end. A cable with "white tips" will be slower.

 

[OwenLentz]

Owen --

Try the free "AJA System Test Lite" from the Apple Store:

‎AJA System Test Lite

‎AJA System Test Lite is a great way to test a storage system with a real world speed test. Designed with digital video production and post production needs in mind, it emulates the writing and reading of video files to and from a hard disk and displays the results in a simple, easy to read...

apps.apple.com

IMPORTANT:
Make sure you go to the area labeled "Target Disk" and select your external SSD as the "source drive". See the image below.

Try this and let us know what you get.
If you get a poor result, check the cable.
A USB3 cable has "blue tips" on the end. A cable with "white tips" will be slower.
View attachment 2334086

Thanks for your reply and help.It seems to be working faster now with both utility tests. Maybe it just needed time? Any thoughts on why google chrome is now not working? I tried reinstalling it, it opens up and then just immediately crashes? Interestingly though when the speed tests was slow earlier. Safari wasn't working properly, it had lines and missing text etc and I had to use chrome. Now that its faster, chrome is not working at all and Safari is way faster than it was.

My cable looks like its blue on the inside.

Any thought?

Thanks

 

[Fishrrman]

The speeds you're seeing in reply 39 above look to be pretty good.
About "the best one can get" with a SSD boot drive on a USB3 connection is around 430 or so.

 

[OwenLentz]

The speeds you're seeing in reply 39 above look to be pretty good.
About "the best one can get" with a SSD boot drive on a USB3 connection is around 430 or so.

Awesome thanks! Its definitely faster now. Any ideas on why chrome is not working? Ive tried rebooting in safe mode, deleted and reinstalled. It opens and then immediately crashes, so far all the info out there that Ive found requires it at least stay open.

Any help would be appreciated. Cheers

 

[astrobill]

Hi,

my parents are still rocking the late 2013 iMac (14,1) with a 2.7 GHz i5, 8GB of Ram and a 1TB Hard Drive.

They use it for super basic things like surfing, sorting pictures and light office work. However, since the upgrade to MacOS Catalina, the Mac has become suuuper slow. Opening the browser takes like a minute....

They are thinking about getting a new one, but given the 24" M1 iMac has been out for quite a while now, I wanted to see whether we can keep this one running for another year or so (until the M3 version comes out).

Do you see any merit in upgrading the Hard Drive to an SSD? Do you think that would make the iMac considerably faster? Along the SSD upgrade I would install a clean version of MacOS, which should also help. Would you further recommend upgrading from 8 to 16 GB of RAM in the process?

Thanks!!

I know this is a two year old post, but I upgraded my 2013 iMac with an OtherWord Computing OWC internal 1TB SSD kit and it made a massive difference. The machine is still super useful now in 2024. Pretty fast compared to its original speed, too. My experience using an external SSD first and trying to run MacOS off the external SSD wasn't super effective.

I also managed to get MacOS Ventura to run perfectly on it, even though it's YEARS out of support by Apple using the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP). Its like having a lower-end but modern iMac. Really happy with the result.

Prying apart the monitor screen and doing the SSD internal install does require a bit of confidence, as does using OCLP, though. It took me a couple of tries to get OCLP to work correctly, and I had to "recover" the Mac using the built-in recovery function at least once, but when I finally got it to all work, it was well worth it.