In old computers, the most frequent performance bottlenecks in day-to-day use are caused by having to wait for the hard drive. It’s absolutely true, followed closely by adding more RAM. Thanks! WhyĪsk around the Internet and most people will tell you that the single most important upgrade you can make to an old computer is an SSD. Also, the Amazon links in this article are affiliate links, so if you buy anything through one of those links, I’ll get a small kickback from Amazon. I followed the iFixit guide throughout the entire process and if you’re thinking of upgrading your own iMac, I suggest you do the same. Before I begin, please note that this article is not a how-to manual, and as such it should never replace the excellent step-by-step guides available on iFixit and elsewhere on the Internet. This is an account of how the upgrade went, the difficulties I found, and whether I recommend anyone do the same (Spoiler alert: yes, very much so). Set everything up in a comfortable environment and get to work! IntroductionĪ couple of weekends ago I finally had time for a project I’d been wanting to do for months: upgrading my iMac’s internal hard drive to an SSD. The rest of the article has been preserved in its original form for historical accuracy. It’s a terrific machine and I have no plans to replace it anytime soon. Prices vary slightly on Amazon but you can’t go wrong with any of these, so my advice would be to get whichever is cheaper at the moment.Įven though it will not be supported by the newly-announced macOS Sierra, my Early-2008 iMac is still my primary Mac. That said, keep in mind that in this case the bottleneck will be your iMac’s 3 Gb/s SATA 2 interface, so any of these drives will have nearly identical performance. If you want something fancier, both the Samsung 850 Pro and the SanDisk Extreme Pro are excellent, as well. The original text is still valid, but SSD recommendations are now outdated.Īs of July 2016, the consumer-grade SSD I recommend is the Samsung 850 EVO.

Since then, it’s consistently been the most popular piece on this site almost every month. UPDATE, July 16, 2016: This article was originally published on May 21, 2014.

2008 imac hard drive replacement