Do-It-Yourself: Upgrading Apple's 27" iMac With An SSD

[achim]

Love Apple or hate it, the company's iMac is a popular machine. Per the usual, though, Apple way overcharges for an SSD upgrade. Today, we're going to show you how to replace the iMac's hard drive with your own SSD and hopefully save a bundle of money.

Do-It-Yourself: Upgrading Apple's 27" iMac With An SSD : Read more

 

[amuffin]

ALLOW THE APPLE HATING TO COMMENCE!!!!!

 

[tipmen]

^^
I will start the hate amuffin

Phew! I'm glad the sheeple will save $200+. It is unlikely that a majority of Apple owners would be able to do this. Hell I bet they aren't even willing (besides voiding the warranty). I think they have this belief if apple does the upgrade it will be "better".

 

[amuffin]

$20-30 just to install a SSD which then costs another 200+ dollars. THEN I don't get my HDD Data and STORAGE!!! NO DUAL DRIVES!!!!

 

[killabanks]

yeah $30 to do it yourself loool only thing it got going for it is that screen

 

[jprahman]

HeHe [Sits back with popcorn waiting for the Apple haters to show up. ]

 

[Plasmid]

Seems like a lot work given such basic upgrade, now imagine replacing the motherboard. horror story/ true story

 

[amk-aka-Phantom]

Pfff. 95% of Mac users don't even know there're swappable parts incide their PC.

 

[slomo4sho]

Better than paying a 50% premium by going through Apple store.

 

[The Greater Good]

No wonder Apple users are so stiff. They just got pounded in the rear.

 

[tacoslave]

99% of mac owners are too busy being the 1%

 

[manu 11]

Moral of the day, apple seriously rips you. Your own assembled pc is 100000x better and stronger than the imac thing.

 

[pharoahhalfdead]

I don't own a mac, but I was always curious of how to do this. I thought most of the hardware was soldered on, I didn't know parts were interchangeable. Good article.

 

[monsta]

Does Tom's think its Macrumour now?

 

[molo9000]

[citation][nom]manu 11[/nom]Moral of the day, apple seriously rips you. Your own assembled pc is 100000x better and stronger than the imac thing.[/citation]

Yeah, because you can assemble your own all-in-one PC... oh wait... you can't.

Comparing a normal PC in a tower case to an all-in-one is like comparing it to a laptop. Completely different form-factor.

Apple hardware upgrade prices are a joke though...

 

[KelvinTy]

It's an interesting decision to use black pcb in a never meant to be opened case... Looking at how annoying it is to be serviced, it seems it's just not worth it to buy a factory mac... Just get a hackintosh for god sake.

 

[razor512]

apple needs to fit the design flaw of there being a glass shield for the screen.

that one design flaw requires me to run a air filter for 3 hours before taking the system, then having to work on the system almost completely naked just to keep dust from getting in between the glass and the LCD

 

[Guest]

@Razor512 ... and then you realize that dust is mostly made from dead human skin and you just got naked during a standard PC upgrade for no apparent reason.

 

[uruquiora]

it's not likely that a lot of people will do that, especially cos it probably wipes out any warranty...
And don't Apple lovers love to be ripped off anyway ??

 

[joytech22]

Pity, I have the 21.5".
Just got it too, want to stick my old OCZ drive in there and 8GB of RAM.

And yes, I know my shit when it comes to computers.. The difference with me is I'm not biased any more.

 

[andy_newton]

Why keep the superdrive? Apple Superdrive is the pinnacle of stupidity throughout the era of personal computing.

You'd be better of replacing the HDD with a Hitachi 4TB and putting the SSD on the superdrive's slot with an adapter from MCEtech.com instead.

The superdrive (if you insist on having it anyway) can be put into a USB 2.0 enclosure and be stashed somewhere until you need it.

The best way is to partition the SSD into 3:

1) Mac OSX
2) HFS+ partition for Adobe's scratch & caches folder and/or for stuff you're using.
3) Windows 7 64 bit

And it is best to partition the 4TB HDD:
1) Scratch folder for your footages, libraries, render files, & etc
2) Archive of your older projects & Windows 7 Backup Image
3) Bootable Mac OSX Back Up partition

Or you can just wipe Mac OSX, install Windows 7 64bit, and just play crisis with the iMac

 

[massprince]

i own a mac and a pc and you wont have to go through this hellacious process with a pc. Tom has too much time in his hands. Get a real life!

 

[halcyon]

[citation][nom]uruquiora[/nom]it's not likely that a lot of people will do that, especially cos it probably wipes out any warranty...And don't Apple lovers love to be ripped off anyway ??[/citation]
A co-worker on my team has been mulling this upgrade over for a long time. This is the kind of reason I went with the Mac Pro versus an an iMac. To me it rediculous that you'd have to go through all this just to save a couple of bucks. ...any system that's I can't simply change the hard drives in is a system I would not want.
The first thing I did on the very first day I got my Mac Pro was to put 2 OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs in it for RAID 0. They've been happily slicing through code every since.

i own a mac and a pc and you wont have to go through this hellacious process with a pc. Tom has too much time in his hands. Get a real life!

As do I. Yes the new iMacs are good for those who believe a computer is just a decorative commodity (how'd ya like that phrase...de-cor-a-tive com-mod-ity ...just made that up 😉 . ...and yes, the performance on the current models (outside of gaming) is very competitive. You just sacrifice a lot (and not just from your wallet) to go with an iMac. ...its not food that I'd recommend for the enthusiast.

iMac? ...maybe fur my mum.

 

[massprince]

mac is a computer for the idiots

 

[Guest]

Oh,they switched to black PCBs.Before 4 years when i've accembed those POS,all the PCBs were blue.