Installing a SSD drive into a mid-2007 iMac

I have a mid-2007 iMac with a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo processor and despite the fact that it is already six years old, it still does a good job. However, compared to a friend’s recent MacBook Air with a solid state disk (SSD) it felt sluggish when opening programmes and loading larger documents.

So, I thought it would be worthwhile to replace the old spinning hard disk drive with an SSD, instead of buying a new computer. I still like the display of the iMac. Hence, I got myself a Samsung 840 SATA drive, as it came with a USB cable and bracket hard drive holder.

It actually wasn’t that difficult to replace the hard drive in my iMac. Of course I can give no guarantee that this works for you as well. Here are the steps I took:

• Connected the new SSD via USB to my iMac
• Cloned old internal hard drive to new SSD, using Carbon Copy Cloner
• Tested new SSD extensively. Booted the Mac from the new SSD connected externally via USB.
• Followed iFixit guide and replaced hard drive
• Crossed my fingers and switched my iMac on again.

So far I am really happy with the new SSD. Applications are opening much faster and overall the computer feels much snappier. It looks like it can serve me quite a little longer.

Here are a few pictures of the surgery:

iMac with glass panel and bezel removed

Display and hard drive removed

New SSD and old HDD

Screen shot of the new system preferences