How many people's 24" iMac is still running strong?

[mscriv]

Excellent, thanks. Now to get over my anxiety of opening up the iMac and follow that iFixit video.

The various videos available are really helpful. I followed one from iFixit and looked at several from other sites. The switch is pretty straightforward. The thing I remember being difficult was that the bracket which came with the SSD did not fit. I followed the advice of simply buying velcro strips and securing the SSD directly to the machine. The 2.5" drive is so light that two velcro strips locked it down tight and I've had no problems for over 6 months now.

My iMAC early 2008 24" system is working fine, but I am interested in the solid state drive described above - specifically the Samsung 840 PRO. I went to the Samsung site, but after entering my Model iMac8,1 none of those I looked indicated they would work with my iMAC. Any insights appreciated.

Bob

I didn't get the Pro version, but instead saved some money by going with the regular Samsung 840 250gb SSD. From all of the reviews and research I read there was no reason to choose the Pro over the standard version. I bought mine at Best Buy when they had a sale and installed it last July.

 

[ElectronGuru]

If a solid state unit is to be considered, should the replacement solid state unit be at least 500 GB to equal my current drive? Price now enters into my thinking since this becomes pretty pricey at this level. Any insights appreciated

CONNECTION
ssd come in different sata versions, like usb. Each is faster than the last and each is backwards compatible. For the longest service life, get the newest gen available and don't worry if sata III will work in a sata I, it will.

INSTALLATION
the trick is 2.5" vs 3.5". There are low cost size adapters if you don't wish to use adhesives. If you don't want to open the iMac, you can also get a firewire box. Though for the price, you could also get a bigger SSD.

BRAND
i like crucial, others like Samsung, still others like intel. Avoid the small brands then get the one you like.

SIZE
a given SSD is made up of a number of single chips. every time they 'shrink the die', the capacity of each chip goes up and the number of chips needed for a given SSD size goes down. We had one last year, making 1TB drives possible and 64GB drives impractical. Drives more than say 80% full will wear out faster. make room in your space budget or be ready to offload.

PRICE
higher price points allow for better features. The crucial 480 and 960 have reliability features not present in the smaller m500 drives. So to with pro vs evo Samsung. But for many, the base model is enough because the tech itself has gotten so good. And don't worry about HDD costing less per gig. It's the only remaining advantage and as sales continue to drop, so will prices. They will always be cheaper, until they shut down production.

RESULTS
The oldest machine I've put SSD into is a 2006 mini and it's now much master. Any machine you still use will benefit. Having done all 4 of my macs, I would do any machine that is core duo or better.

 

[Lucianrider]

I've posted here before but my wifes early 2008 iMac 24" has just been wiped and upgraded to a new install of Mavericks and will become a back up machine or guest machine now that she has a new 27" iMac.

Its been a great machine since Christmas of 2008 when I gave it to her as a present. The only failure it had was the power supply which I replaced using one I got off Ebay. The hard drive has been upgraded to a 1 TB and the memory is maxed out at 6 GB.

It will now get a well deserved rest until it is needed... It was only turned off when we went away on holiday for a couple of weeks a year. A stellar machine and one I would be happy to use myself if I didn't already have a mid 2011 21.5" iMac.

 

[BSoares]

How long do you expect to get out of it?

Sorry, only saw your quote today. I did sell it shortly after buying a 27" iMac at the end of 2012.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

Sorry, only saw your quote today. I did sell it shortly after buying a 27" iMac at the end of 2012.

No problem Was just wondering thanks

 

[bobenhaus]

Mine died yesterday don't know what to Do. Its either a video card issue or the logic board.

 

[Grubster]

Mine died on return from vacation last week. Was getting 9 SOS beeps. Replaced Logic board, booted to Apple logo and just hangs. Tech got it to boot with other drive finally with Tiger 10.4.10, then it booted with mavericks. My drive still won't boot. Next day, it won't boot off ANY drive. Any idea what to do? Could my video card be shot? I'm having a hard time spending 300 on a 7 year old video card. I got the logic board for dirt cheap.

Mid 2007 24" iMac 2.8 extreme

 

[talmy]

It is funny that this 1.5+ year old thread boasting about the longevity of 24" iMacs is now turning into a 24" iMac obituary thread.

(FYI, the two 24" iMacs I maintain are still running strong.)

 

[txjeep]

My early 2008 24" iMac is still running well, but I find myself waiting on it to catch up more and more. It crashes from time to time when I have too many programs open. I think I'm asking too much of it these days. I looked at the 27s yesterday at the Apple store. They are very nice. No yellow screen issues on any of them I looked at, by the way. If they had one with an i7 and an SSD, I would have walked out with it. I may go back and get the one with the i7 & 3TB fusion drive after reading the positive fusion drive reviews on this site today.

 

[mcrazza]

Mine's still alive and mostly going strong. (see sig for specs)

My mac is my main computer and it's been a really reliable workhorse.

But it hasn't always been smooth sailing.

I've only had one major issue and that was when the Western Digital 500GB hard drive died in mid-2012 and was later replaced with a Seagate 1TB. I've found that it's not as quiet as the WD and it seems *a little bit* slow. It tends to grumble and pause here and there whereas the WD never did.

Unfortunately a year ago I did a routine check in Disk Utility and was shocked to discover that the SMART status for the HDD was labelled as "Failing". I downloaded a couple of apps to check the state of the HDD and both results concurred with Disk Utility. According to Disk Utility it's a hardware problem that cannot be repaired. The thing is that it runs fine (mostly) but due to its failing status I cannot upgrade from ML to Mavericks. Basically it needs to be replaced… again.

It turns out that the hard drive in my mac is the notorious Seagate ST31000528ASQ, which has A LOT of documented issues. I thought it was pretty dodgy that the repair guy put in a POS hard drive that is well-known to have issues.

I've had some freezes from time-to-time in the last year. The screen would freeze and all input becomes unresponsive. I had originally put it down to Safari and Preview because those apps were always open when the freezing occurred. But the Console app suggests that the freezing has something to do with the video card (ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MB). *shrugs* Anyway I haven't had any freezes since the middle of last year.

About a year more-or-less into the life of my imac the CPU fan started to spin fast frequently and at times roar. The strange thing is that I would be doing something hardly CPU-intensive and not have many apps open and the fan would slowly but surely speed up until it would roar for a while at 3000+ RPM and calm back down again where it would hover around the 1600-2500RPM mark, according to iStat Pro. It's been like that ever since and I just can't remember how quiet the mac was when I first got it. It gets quite loud when I play games like HL2, Halo, Tomb Raider 8 and 9, and CS:GO too. The top lefthand side of the mac where the vent is is hot to touch whereas the middle and right of the vent is cool.

I assume there's dust on the blades of the CPU fan which might be partly to blame but it could stem from a whole host of issues. There could be dust inside the heat sinks for the CPU and GPU too. The Power Supply temp always hovers around the 80ºC mark as well. Or it could be a thermal paste issue on the CPU or GPU - from the research I did it appears to be a documented fault on the 2006 white imacs and the 2007-2009 aluminum imacs. Or it could be a dodgy heat sensor. Maybe the GPU is overheating or there could be a fault with the copper tubes connected to the heat sinks. I don't know. But they're all plausible.

Money is tight at the moment but I will endeavour to get the HD replaced with a better one and get to the bottom of the CPU fan issue.

 

[sgtbob]

Interesting - but https://forums.macrumors.com/search/?searchid=39000774 does not produce a readable site - perhaps the blog was removed by ‘powers that be?’

After viewing the prices of a solid state drive, I opted for the technician to replace my original 500 GB HDD with a 1 TB WDC WD1003FZEX-00MK2A0 which thus far (3 months) has been working great. I hope this unit is more serviceable than the one experienced by the foregoing respondent. My original 500 GB drive crashed after working almost daily for 6 years - not bad for almost any product these days in the ‘planned obsolescence’ era!

 

[deviant]

have mine since september 2007 and it's been running 24/7/365 for the last 5 years (damn .. ) upgraded to 4gb ram and samsung 840 250gb ssd after the original WD died. i have a mba 2012 with an i5 and i can't honestly tell the difference sometimes. sometimes it's noticeable, but most of the time it's as fast as it can get (instantaneous) love it.. and hope it's good for at least 2 more years.
for quite some time i've been using it like a TV.. NBA league pass, plex home theatre, my iTunes music library is on it as well and some random stuff like internet/email. well, it's not under heavy load.. so will see how it goes..

 

[mcrazza]

Interesting - but https://forums.macrumors.com/search/?searchid=39000774 does not produce a readable site - perhaps the blog was removed by ‘powers that be?’

Huh.

Well, you can do a forum search for "ST31000528ASQ" - it works. There's Google too, hehe. Here's a popular thread regarding the high failure rate of said hard drive.

 

[sliceoftoast]

Yeppers mine is!

All the Hardware is original except the power supply. Which failed. I had another iMac laying around the workshop that had a faulty motherboard so i just transplanted the power supply.

 

[iMcLovin]

My 2008 iMac is still running strong. Now its a minecraft machine for my kids, but they are using it every day and it runs just like it did when I got it.

 

[Jiten]

My secretary still uses her trusty ole 2009 iMac. I upgraded it with a 256gb SSD years ago and still works flawlessly. I asked yesterday if she wanted to upgrade hers and she told me to get lost.

 

[bwilly]

New lease on 24" imac life

Just started following this thread. I have a mid 2009 imac that was killing me, begging to be replaced. It was slow as heck, applications would take 30 seconds to boot, etc. I'm running mavericks ( a slight improvement in performance over lion)
I couldn't take it anymore so I ordered a new 27" imac. Maxed out the processor 16 gb ram. 512 ssd. It's still in transit from apple.
My next step was to clone my current imac drive, erase the old drive and do a clean install of mavericks.
All I can say is wow what a difference. The old imac is crazy fast now for everyday use. Safari boots up in 2-3 seconds rather than watching the dock icon bounce 40 times. It's still slow at intensive tasks, but that's a product of the slower processor. For internet, email, and word processing it's now acting like a brand new machine. It'll work great for my kids as a homework/Netflix toy.
I still can't wait for my new machine, but don't tell my wife I fixed the old one, she won't be happy.
I think the problem was too many years of old files and software. I had never done a clean install of any system upgrades. I had even used migration assistant to transition from my old g5 imac to the 24" Intel so I had innumerable old files, even power PC software bogging it down.

 

[mmomega]

raises hand

I recently formatted my 2011 iMac and removed the SSD RAID0 setup to move that machine to our new clinic location so my Mid-07 iMac is about to get it's aging HDD replaced with a Samsung 830 SSD.
I placed 1 of the Samsung 830's in my Mac Mini to create a Fusion Drive and I had no use for the 2nd until I thought, "Oh why not? I'll just install it into the '07. " It should breathe a little more life back into the Ol' girl.

 

[icemantx]

Early 2009 still running but showing its age now

Until recently I never really used my Early 2009 (March) iMac for very much 1080p video editing and have started to now - mostly photos until now. And now reality has set in. Editing 1080p videos on my iMac is a challenge and it struggles - beach all heaven. Handbrake takes forever (10-12 hours) too converting 1080p ripped blu-rays (ones I own) to MPEG-4. I have 8GB Ram and a DIY fusion drive (256GB SSD Crucial in the optical bay + 2TB WD Caviar Black) so I have pretty much maxed it out and extended its life as much as I can.

I always go by the rule that I will buy a new computer when it does not do what I need it to or do it very well anymore and I am there.

However, I will keep trucking along until new iMacs come out later this year and put a new 27" iMac on my Christmas list.

I will say I will miss the ability to upgrade the drives in the new iMacs and will need to rely on external drives as time goes on and my needs change.

 

[JRoDDz]

Early 2009 24" iMac still running strong

My Early 2009 24" is still running strong. It's maxed out on RAM to 8GB and I just put in a new SSHD 1TB drive in it, cleaned out some dusty fans and it's running great. I was worried that the old 640GB will soon fail due to it's age. New drive is speedy. It boots Mavericks 10.9.3 in about 30 seconds.

 

[762999]

I still use my 2008 iMac every day.. running strong for casual tasks. It shows it age only when doing video conversion/editing. I replaced the HDD because the other one failed. I'm running OSX 10.9.3. It's very slow to boot and log-in but once it's booted up everything is running fine. I'm considering an upgrade but I will still use it until then. I intend to give it to someone else after I'm done so it will still be used!

 

[mcrazza]

I'm seriously considering putting a SSD into my 2008 imac. I'm just not sure if I should replace the 1TB HDD for a 256GB SSD* or I should replace the 1TB HDD for a new one (it's currently failing, that's why) AND remove the superdrive to make way for a SSD. The latter option is more expensive but it would extend the life of my machine.

*A bit of a downgrade in terms of storage. I've currently used up 187GB of 1TB, but I could move the movie, photo and iTunes libraries onto external storage thus freeing up space.

 

[Brian33]

mcrazza: I have an Early 2008 24" 2.8 GHz (EMC 2211) and it looks like you have the same machine. One thing to keep in mind for these iMacs is that the hard drive bay has a 3 Gb/s SATA interface, but the optical superdrive bay uses an ATA (also called PATA) interface. Speed of PATA interfaces can vary (wikipedia), and I was never able to determine the exact speed in my iMac, but all are significantly slower in maximum transfer rate than the 3 Gb/s SATA.

Meaning, if you decide to install your new SSD in the optical drive bay, its performance on certain tasks will be more limited than it would be in the HDD bay (although even using the HDD bay will still limit the newer 6 Gb/s SSDs from reaching their maximum potential).

Whether restricting the maximum throughput to PATA speeds will have a noticeable effect on your specific use cases is hard to know. I would guess (I'm guessing and I'm not particularly knowledgeable in this area) that it might be noticeable during the copying of very large files from a similarly fast device, but would probably be less noticeable in read/writes of many small files (where the very quick access times of an SSD would still help a lot even if its maximum transfer rate were limited to 133 MB/s, for example).

In any case, I decided to install my SSD in the 3 Gb/s SATA bay in place of the original HDD, and removed the optical drive and installed a 1 TB 2.5" HDD there. I then combined them into a "homemade" DIY Fusion drive with the appropriate Terminal commands.

It's been about 8 months now, and I'm very happy with how it worked out. I really like the Fusion drive for fast response and ease of managing. I've had no problems related to drives I installed or the Fusion drive setup. This is my daily-user machine and I expect to keep using it for at least 2 or 3 more years!

There are a few issues with using an external optical drive related to boot-up capability and its use with Apple's DVD Player software, but nothing that can't be remedied.

I used this iFixit part: 2.7 mm PATA Optical Bay SATA Hard Drive Enclosure

 

[thedeske]

It is funny that this 1.5+ year old thread boasting about the longevity of 24" iMacs is now turning into a 24" iMac obituary thread.

(FYI, the two 24" iMacs I maintain are still running strong.)

Late 2006 24 still cookin' - Dead DVD, but who Gives A Sht really? A late 2009 opti died sooner here

One could argue that the QC was higher when they were making less machines. Some of the early 2000 era macs were tanks IMO.

 

[duncyboy]

Bought an entry-level Mid-2007 20" iMac in March 2008. Still works absolutely fine, is running Mountain Lion as we speak.