Oct/100
How to change your SSD in a 27inch iMac
So my boss, Johnathan Beddoes got himself a new iMac 27inch and being a person who likes good tech decided he should add the $900 option of a extra SSD, the shock when he got it was that the SSD is rather, lack of a better word, crap. So to not make a perfect system have a weak boot drive we decided to replace it with a OSZ SSD which has MILES better performance than the Toshiba drive that is in the iMac, so now this journey begins on how to replace this drive.
Before I start, let me begin that this iMac had the drive fitted and apparently if you order it without drive you dont get the cables, tray and power need to fit one, and you’ll need to source that and take out the whole motherboard to fit it.
The first step to this is to follow the one of many tutorials and remove the screen and LCD to get to the meat of your iMac, there are many of these just google/youtube.
your first problem youll find is locating the drive, its actually under your graphics card (yeah took me a second too), and to get to it you have to remove: SATA harddrive, cables over graphics card (be careful) and then remove the grafics card, and then I found it easier to also remove the DVD rom.
Once your get to touch the drive you find that well…. it wont just come out. So I’ll explain all the plans we went though to fit this drive
Plan A: to fit the drive on top of the original one and simple have the old drive as a paper weight inside the machine.
Result: Didnt fit right, even trying it in diffrent positions the clearances are to small inside the machine.
Plan B: To fit it under the DVD rom, as there a air duct space.
Result: Well we looked at it but fears of blocking air scared us off it.
Plan C: To gut the current drive and try fit the new one in the space, bit like Plan A but with more space. When we were doing this we realised the tray the SSD is in glues in tray…… ya your guess is as good as mine as WHY Steve decided to GLUE a tray in that is also held in by screws. So once you painfully and slowly pull the tray off you can then release the drive and replace it.
Follow the steps in reverse to rebuild your machine and boot and install your OS, and then enjoy not having a crappy speed machine all down to changing your SSD.
