Ok, so its been on the cards for sometime now. The iMac I got back in April just had to have the SSD treatment, it couldn't be held back any longer.
The challenge of putting the drive in is not for the faint of heart, and I saw this as a personal challenge to ignore those who worry and to just get on with it.
Now for those of you who know nothing about iMac disassembly then I can tell you it is quite unwieldy to review Youtube videos explaining how to do it, each one just that little bit different from the other!
Tools are required for the job, here are my tool choices.
SSD
SSD Bracket (as I am replacing my Superdrive with an SSD, leaving the internal SATA HDD in place) i bought this from Amazon
T10 Torx screwdriver
Philips Screwdriver
Suction cups
Air duster
Disposable gloves to keep marks off screen and glass
Microfibre cloth
Tweezers of some kind
Ok so the first thing you need to do is remove the front glass panel, its a piece of cake and you really don't need to buy a set of suckers if you have lets say a sat nag window sucker for your car. I bought the above set for £7 from www.screwfix.co.uk as they were available over the counter, they did the job but were really way to powerful for the job. Like cracking a hazelnut with a sledgehammer, never less it worked!
The screen is only held on with magnets, and once you have pulled it away a bit you can easily remove the glass panel.
Make sure you put the glass panel down somewhere safe, and protected from being scratched.
There are 4 T10 torx screws each side to undo, a total of 8. They are very obvious so I haven't detailed them in the picture here. There are millions of guides if you are too blind to see the 8 screws in front of your very eyes ;-)
Ok when you remove the panel there are several cables to detach, make a note of where they are (again this is all covered in a million other guides).
Ok now we can see the internals of the iMac, as you can see it is very easy to replace the internal HDD with another model if needed at this point, but I am just installing an SSD in place of the Superdrive on the left.
To remove the SuperDrive you will need to lift up the metal foil along its front edge first.
Carefully detach the thermal sensor pad from rear of the SuperDrive.
Remove the 4 screws holding SuperDrive in place.
Lift it out and detach the Slim ATA connector… this is where my problem arose originally as I hadn't purchased the SSD caddy at this point. A standard SSD will have a SATA connector on it that is 21 pins, and the iMac uses slim SATA which is 15 pins! So you need a caddy or a fancy cable convertor (which are very hard to source without waiting for something from the US of A!).
Below you can see the slim SATA connector in all its glory, and then pictured with my SSD, as you can see no fit!!!
So this is where Part 1 finishes, as I have to do this all again now I have the caddy.
Putting the iMac back together is no more tricky than taking it apart, the most important thing is to make sure you use the air spray and micro fibre cloth to keep dust off the screen etc. I had no issues doing mine at all, and there is no dust under the glass.
Part 2 coming very soon…..
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