Some people prefer to keep their old hard drives and replace the optical drive with an SSD. IMacs sold between 2009 and mid-2012 have two drive bays: one for the hard drive, and one for the DVD/CD SuperDrive. Here’s how I did it, and – if you’re up for a quick do-it-yourself project – what I’d recommend for you.įirst Choice: Are You Replacing or Keeping Your Old Hard Drive? With limited expertise and only three tools, I swapped out my old hard drive for an SSD in roughly 30 minutes. Today, high-quality, capacious SSDs can be had for reasonable prices, and they’re surprisingly easy to install in iMacs. SSDs use high-speed memory chips rather than the spinning platter mechanisms in traditional hard drives, achieving up to 5X benefits in speed while requiring no moving parts. Five years ago, SSDs were both expensive and limited in capacity, making them unlikely components for most Macs.
Yet there’s something you can do for $200 to $500 that will radically change your iMac’s performance: install a solid state drive (SSD) in addition to or instead of its original hard drive. Sure, the new iMac with 5K Retina Display looks a little nicer, but at a steep $2,499 starting point, it’s still a luxury, not a necessity. Once that is complete you can create a new disk image of the smaller partition and happily restore it to the new drive.Īs always, make sure you have a backup of everything before you do anything like this to your hardware.If you bought your iMac 3-5 years ago, there’s probably nothing so seriously wrong with the hardware that you need to consider replacing the machine. It will only resize the original partition and create a new partition for you.
In my case I made a 20GB partition, which made the original partition 478GB, which was smaller than the 480GB SSD drive capacity.ĭoing this will not remove any data. Load up the source drive in Disk Image, either in recovery mode (if it's in your device) or as an external USD or something.Ĭlick the Partition button on the source drive.Īssuming you have just one partition, you should see a pie chart showing the single partition and the shaded part indicating the actual used space of the partition.Ĭreate a new partition on the drive that is large enough to make the original partition with the data small enough to fit on the destination SSD. So, I looked around for a way to "squeeze" the larger disk image into the slightly smaller SSD, but I couldn't find anything. There's only about 300 GB of data on the 498 GB drive so I thought I could just create an image file of the source drive and then restore it to the new SSD, but it complained about the SSD drive being too small to restore the backup to. In my case I had a 498 GB 5200 RPM drive that I was replacing with a 480GB SSD. Repartition the Source Drive and You Won't Lose Data. I've used iopending to see that pending disk operations are, in fact, slowing me down. How can I clone my data from the larger drive onto the new, smaller drive? I'd love a solution that uses solely built-in Apple tools (like Disk Utility or asr) or something open source. I just want to boot to the new drive and have it work.Īlso, I'm using FileVault on the old drive. I don't want any changes to file modification times or permissions, etc. To be clear: what I want is an exact clone, byte-for-byte.