I'll be honest, in all the old iMacs that I've upgraded to SSDs, I've never used an adapter sled. I usually just double-sided tape it to the back of the iMac which has always worked well enough. It's a desktop, it doesn't move too much
For what it's worth, these machines run High Sierra beautifully using the Dosdude1 patcher found here. I've been running HS on my 2008 24" for years now, and other than the APFS patch at startup you'd be hard pressed to tell that it wasn't natively supported.
I had previously patched a Mac mini up to Catalina with a dosdude1 patcher. Considering that most software today is High Sierra minimum, maybe I should consider patching this.
Go for it! I’ve used the Mojave and Catalina patchers before as well, and they’re a bit iffier of an experience compared to the High Sierra patcher I’ve found. They work well enough but with some clear compromises, none of which I’ve found with the high Sierra patcher.
It's installed by the Dosdude1 patcher automatically on machines that don't natively support APFS booting. His tools are fantastic!
That's exactly what I'd be looking for with this iMac. As close to an official release as is possible. I definitely found that the Catalina patcher for the 2011 mini was pretty finicky and felt a bit hacky.
Good luck! If you need any help with it, let me know - I've been running Dosdude1'd High Sierra macs for years now and would love to help another person show Apple what for with their old Macs
Hehehe, IDK, even if it goes to his head I think he deserves to think highly of himself and his work for the old-ass Mac communityHe is, without question, a wizard, the bane of Apple. I hope he doesn’t read this remark because I really don’t want this going to his head (and I really, really hope Apple don’t try to poach him to halt his community tinkering).
They might employ him, as they did with ALS.
Those iMacs are great to work on, and as you’ve found out for yourself now, quite peppy with an SSD! So many of these older machines are held back so severely by their spinning disks and can be brought up to respectable usability with a cheap SSD.
The funny thing is that I built a desktop with very similar specs back in 2008 and I sold it years ago because it was just bordering on unusable. It had a Core 2 Quad, 8 GB of RAM, a SATA III SSD and a gaming GPU and despite all that, this 'lesser' spec iMac with its dual core, 4 GB and only SATA II manages to be usable even in 2023.
Apologies to @B S Magnet for hijacking your thread