Need advice on upgrading late 2009 iMac SSHD

[IconicM]

Hello everyone,

I am seeking advice on SSHD and SSD upgrade options.

My 3 year old 1.2 TB SSHD seems to be dead. I had partitioned 1 TB for OS X and 200 GB for windows, but I never installed windows. However, I used about 800 GB on the OS X side, mostly pictures and music.

This is a 27" 11,1 model with 2.66 GHz core i5 processor with 12 GB RAM.

Because I am close to 1 TB in capacity, I am looking to upgrade to a Seagate Firecuda 2 TB SSHD and adding a second drive, a Mushkin 500 GB SSD (behind the optical drive). Mushkin because of price, $150 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226852


Concerns:
1. I am adding the SSD to get (and keep) a good speed boost. Planning to load OS X and Office on SSD and the rest on SSHD. Will this work well? Any suggestions on setting up iTunes?

2. I am worried about these dropping back to SATA 1 speeds. I searched and I know some have had trouble with SATA 3 drives dropping down to SATA 1 speeds but I could not find any related threads. Will I need to resort to SATA 2 specific drives to get the most speed?

3. If there are no issues with the above plan, I would be using time machine to back up to a 4TB external drive. Is this fairly straight forward or any suggestions otherwise?

Thanks in advance for your help and tips.

 

[kschendel]

Re the SATA speeds, it seems to be specific to one controller (the nvidia MCP79) interacting with certain SSD's. I have a Mushkin Reactor (500 Gb) in an early 2009 iMac and it runs at sata 2 most of the time, although very occasionally it will boot up and run at sata 1 speed. (I have no proof that the same thing didn't happen with the original HDD!) As far as I know, there is no SSD that is 100% guaranteed to always 100% of the time run at SATA 2 with that crappy controller. The good news: a) once the iMac negotiates sata 2, it seems to stay that way until a reboot, and b) the perceived difference is actually minimal most of the time.

 

[IconicM]

Thanks for that info kschendel!

Well I ended up buying a WD Gold 2TB drive and the Mushkin 500 GB SSD, plus a drive cadd, all from New Egg. I was going to buy the Seagate FireCuda from MacSales, as I like to support them when I can,but the SSHD that failed is also a seagate and I looked through my records and figured out I had installed in March 2015 so it ran a little over 2 years. Not very good.

For back-up I might use a different solution than time machine, but I will be backing up the SSD and SSHD to two separate drives to keep that clean and kosher

Hope it goes well.