Slow iMac, jammed HDD, multiple iPhoto albums, need help

[Doctorsti]

the quick story is I have the top of the range 2008 24" iMac that had a HDD replacement a few years ago. OS has been updated to whatever is before Mavericks, snow leopard I think. I have to get it back up and running now and combine the pictures from my wife's MBP. Problem is the HDD is 650 GB or something of which 638 is used. Not good I know. I have a 1TB hybrid drive to clone too and then add her photos and then back the whole thing up on a 4TB raid drive.

Should I bag the whole thing and buy a new iMac? If not then I need to clone this drive or just save necessary files which is likely 500GB archive of pics and video and do a fresh install.

Can anyone help or point me to a tutorial for the processes I will need to go through. I realize it's a lot of steps and variables but because of that and me not being highly tech savvy anymore it's almost too daunting.

I hate to bring it to Genius Bar and say "fix it" and just pay but I don't want to screw anything up.

I will post machines exact specs but it has the top processed like 3.06 and maxed RAM which I think was 4GB back then.

 

[old-wiz]

What would you expect the genius bar to do? Nothing you describe points to a hardware issue. The Genius Bar will not upgrade hardware for you.

 

[Doctorsti]

What would you expect the genius bar to do? Nothing you describe points to a hardware issue. The Genius Bar will not upgrade hardware for you.

Thanks for the extremely helpful and sensitive reply. Sorry I'm not an IT professional so I do appreciate when those with more knowledge really help point me in the right direction.

 

[glenthompson]

Best place for tutorials on hardware fixes is Ifixit. They cover the 24" iMac. Replacing the hard drive in an iMac is not the easiest job. Go through the guide and decide if your skills are up to the task. When I got a SSD for my wife's 2011 iMac, I opted to have a local Apple service provider do the job. While I felt I could do the task, it was a little trickier than I wanted to handle at the time.

When swapping drives I prefer to clone the old drive to the new one first. That allows me to test the new drive to verify it works properly before going through the install. I use Carbon Copy Cloner with an external enclosure. Once cloned, I can boot off that drive and see that it works. Then do the hardware swap.

You might want to archive some files to an external drive to free up some space. With that little free space you're looking at performance problems and possible crashes. At a minimum you want at least 10% free space. Don;t forget to include any external driver in your backup plan.