I have a 2012 iMac that I just got a notification on that i'm completely out of hard drive room. I have a ton of music and pics mostly. I also back up to an external. What are my options? Do I move some of my stuff over to the hard drive permanently? If i did that I'd have to keep the external on all the times I would guess, is there a problem with that? Can I have an bigger hard drive installed? Is that something I can do or do I have to take it to Apple?
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iMac Memory Options
- Thread starter jw3571
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Replace your internal hard drive with a bigger hard drive.
You can get a 10 TB hard drive if you want.
You can get a 10 TB hard drive if you want.
You can do it yourself.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Hard+Drive+Replacement/15796
Its not something for the faint of heart and there is a high risk of damaging your mac while opening it up. Apple made if very difficult to open it up and modify the system.
While you can do it, you may not want to do it, as you do risk voiding the warranty.
Well, I have never upgraded a hard drive in an iMac until I read the instructions on iFixit and upgraded a hard drive in an iMac: there's a first time for everything.
I also disagree that it is "not something for the faint of heart and there is a high risk of damaging your mac". The iFixit instructions are very detailed and assuming that one follows the instructions, the risk of any damages is minimal.
And of cause, no damage = no void warranty.
I've done it. It is not as bad as it looks. Though you need to very careful with the connectors, especially the large flat LCD connector. There are quite a few people who have damaged that one. It is very easy to shear it off the motherboard if you apply to much pressure when re-mating it, I did on my 2009 iMac. I was able to solder it back on, hadn't used my soldering iron since college. Luckily it didn't damage the pads and came off cleanly.
I've also run externally connected drives that are connected all the time without issue.
In my opinion if your going through the trouble of opening up your iMac, I'd go ahead and upgrade it to all SSD storage internally than use nice raid style enclosure externally. That way failure prone Hard Drives are easy to access, and can be protected via raid, and it is easy to upgrade as your storage needs increase.
It is cheaper than you might think with the drop in SSD prices, and OWC Thunderbays are pretty reasonable.
I've also run externally connected drives that are connected all the time without issue.
In my opinion if your going through the trouble of opening up your iMac, I'd go ahead and upgrade it to all SSD storage internally than use nice raid style enclosure externally. That way failure prone Hard Drives are easy to access, and can be protected via raid, and it is easy to upgrade as your storage needs increase.
It is cheaper than you might think with the drop in SSD prices, and OWC Thunderbays are pretty reasonable.
You are suppose to pull the connector straight back, but some people instead tried to pull it up.
iFixit has an explicit warning about this with a big red exclamation point in a triangle.
Exactly, and what do you think caused that big explicit warning to be added?
And to be fair, I actually broke mine on the re-mate operation. I pushed it in the in correct direction, just used too much force.
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Why not just connect some more external storage and move your iTunes and photos library to that, there are many guides online for this.