[Camali]

My mom's iMac is getting a little slow, its a early 2008 iMac (aluminum). I plan on upgrading the original drive (HItachi 750gb) to a 256 SSD (and keeping the user files on a 1gb external FW800) I've found websites with how to open/replace the drive, but because of the difference in sizes of the SSD and HDs, I'm not sure what bracket/adapter to buy that would fit in the iMac. Anyone ever do this type of upgrade on this model of iMac?

[Waragainstsleep]

If the SSD you are buying is 2.5" form factor you need a bracket that will give it the same width and mounting holes as a 3.5" drive. The aluminium iMacs have two pins that screw into the two lower drive mounting screwholes and a black plastic clip that screws into the top two.

Some SSDs come with brackets but they don't always give you the choice of using the side mounting screws.

[davedecay]

something like this would work

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSD2535BKT/

[Moderator]

I have a mid 2007 24" iMac and this upgrade really gave it a second life. I replaced the internal HD with a 128GB SSD from OWC. and I replaced the optical drive w a 1TB 5400RPM HD for Storage. I keep my system and apps as well as my current years work in progress all on the SSD, and I keep iPhoto, iTunes, and previous years data all of the HD.

The upgrade turned out great for me. I had a local tech place do the actual work for 150, I bought and supplied them with the parts. I feel like its basically a new computer and definitely will keep it for another couple of years.

The one downside was big, it involved firmware for the SSD, which came from OWC. The OWC SSD caused a problem where I was getting lots of I/O errors from the HD (not the SSD) When I ran some scans on the HD it came up with bad sectors. I thought the HD was bad, but as it turned out, the HD was fine, but there was some problem with the SSD where it was corrupting a lot of data on the HD. Time Machine would not run and I could not copy files off of the HD.

An update to the SSD firmware (no easy task without an optical drive) fixed the problem, but all of the data that it corrupted can never be repaired. I had to remove a lot of old files, had to re-create by iPhoto library, and to this data am still coming across random corrupt files that can't be copied. When the time comes that I migrate to a new computer, I am sure that I will have trouble copying some data over. The lesson is that, with 3rd party SSD's its not as simple as it was with HD's. Be careful and have backups.

[davedecay]

Moderator,

Thanks for sharing your info.

I received a 2008 24in iMac this year, the hard drive was dying and the optical is bad. I removed the old optical and put a 2 TB hard drive in place (Western Digital Green), the read/write speed is over 100 MB/sec.

Eventually I might use a caddy to install an SSD boot drive in place of the optical. Something like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Driver-Caddy-Universal-DVD-ROM-Optical/dp/B008XV3M2G/
http://www.amazon.com/HDE%C2%AE-9-5mm-Ultra-Slim-Caddy/dp/B0064A7DAK/

I'm not sure if the speed of the PATA bus would lessen the performance of the SSD, though.

[Waragainstsleep]

It would. Quite a bit.

[davedecay]

So maybe a better choice is to put an SSD into a FW800 enclosure and boot from that.

edit: found an old thread here with great photos, speed tests, etc.

http://forums.macnn.com/0/forum/407408/ssd-installation-in-24-inch-imac

this is the NewerTech bracket we used for someone who put a 2.5in Momentus XT hybrid into his iMac:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/ADPTADRV/

[P]

Originally Posted by davedecay 

So maybe a better choice is to put an SSD into a FW800 enclosure and boot from that.

Not sure what would be best, old UATA or Firewire, but really, if you buy an SSD, put it on SATA. The point about an SSD is that the lower latency leads to better random access values, and sabotaging that by either adding a translation layer (for Firewire) or removing queueing (for UATA) means that much of the gain is lost. If you're installing an SSD, use a 3.5" adapter (bundled with many SSDs) and put it on SATA where the HDD was. You can put the HDD on Firewire.