Late 2012 iMac HDD + SSD Upgrade
Recently my iMac's HDD failed with bad sectors six months after I purchased the machine. I was unfortunately one of those people who bought the late 2012 iMac a month before the late 2013 was released, with the 780MX for the same price as I paid for the 680MX. Thus since I had to tear down the machine anyway, I decided I wanted to add an SSD.
After reading though these forms I found only two option. The first is replace your whole HDD with an SDD (a 3.5 inch HDD in the 27" iMac), and the second being to purchase a rMBP blade SSD and plug it into the slot on the logic board (yes the 27" iMac has the slot even if you didn't order the machine with a fusion drive). Neither of these options appealed to me because I didn't know if the blade SSD would fit correctly and I wanted to keep my 1 TB HDD because I do no want to put my data on an external.
In one of the forms I found someone suggest a kit from Maxupgrades.com. I purchased a Samsung 840 Evo SSD on Amazon (because Samsung Magician software for Windows is the bomb!) and the kit from Max to install in my machine.
The people at Maxupgrades.com are great guys who reply to emails and phone calls quickly. They sent me instructions on how to mount the SSD bracket to the HDD, and also have teardown guides if you need them (though i think iFixit has some of the best visual tear downs).
All said and done the SSD works amazingly well. I use the SSD solely to run a Windows 8.1 bootcamp partition to play Battlefield 4. The speed is incredible in terms of how quick my machine is able to load levels. The only issue I am having is the fans running at 1600 RPM in the OSX 10.9.2 partition. The fan in the late 2012 iMac runs from 1200-2600 RPM normally, but after a PRAM and SCM reset the fan will boot running at 1200, but 30 seconds latter it will spin up. I believe this is because the kit in the blade slot on the logicboard does not have the apple firmware or temperature sensors so it runs the fans up.
The link below is to the pictures I took during the install. I'll do my best to check this post regularly and answer any questions. This is my first time posting to a forums site, but I wanted to share this project that I hope helps some of you who are wanting to do the same to their machines.
Maxparts Kit
https://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=401
My Breakdown
http://imgur.com/a/SdlZn#0
Recently my iMac's HDD failed with bad sectors six months after I purchased the machine. I was unfortunately one of those people who bought the late 2012 iMac a month before the late 2013 was released, with the 780MX for the same price as I paid for the 680MX. Thus since I had to tear down the machine anyway, I decided I wanted to add an SSD.
After reading though these forms I found only two option. The first is replace your whole HDD with an SDD (a 3.5 inch HDD in the 27" iMac), and the second being to purchase a rMBP blade SSD and plug it into the slot on the logic board (yes the 27" iMac has the slot even if you didn't order the machine with a fusion drive). Neither of these options appealed to me because I didn't know if the blade SSD would fit correctly and I wanted to keep my 1 TB HDD because I do no want to put my data on an external.
In one of the forms I found someone suggest a kit from Maxupgrades.com. I purchased a Samsung 840 Evo SSD on Amazon (because Samsung Magician software for Windows is the bomb!) and the kit from Max to install in my machine.
The people at Maxupgrades.com are great guys who reply to emails and phone calls quickly. They sent me instructions on how to mount the SSD bracket to the HDD, and also have teardown guides if you need them (though i think iFixit has some of the best visual tear downs).
All said and done the SSD works amazingly well. I use the SSD solely to run a Windows 8.1 bootcamp partition to play Battlefield 4. The speed is incredible in terms of how quick my machine is able to load levels. The only issue I am having is the fans running at 1600 RPM in the OSX 10.9.2 partition. The fan in the late 2012 iMac runs from 1200-2600 RPM normally, but after a PRAM and SCM reset the fan will boot running at 1200, but 30 seconds latter it will spin up. I believe this is because the kit in the blade slot on the logicboard does not have the apple firmware or temperature sensors so it runs the fans up.
The link below is to the pictures I took during the install. I'll do my best to check this post regularly and answer any questions. This is my first time posting to a forums site, but I wanted to share this project that I hope helps some of you who are wanting to do the same to their machines.
Maxparts Kit
https://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=401
My Breakdown
http://imgur.com/a/SdlZn#0
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