internal harddrive from Imac 21" mid 2011, what type of enclosure?

[Shenden]

Hi,
So my mid 2011 Imac 21" has been broken and been laying in a corner for while, but I now need to remove the harddrive from it. I'm wondering what type of hardrive enclosure will fit for it? Is it just a regular 2,5 enclosure or is it 3.5? (I'm going to connect it to a macbook pro)

 

[Juicy Box]

It is a 3.5" SATA drive. You can use a 3.5" SATA enclosure, or use a cheap USB/SATA adapter cable that has external power like this one:

EYOOLD SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter Cable, SATA III Hard Drive Disk Converter for 2.5 3.5 Inch HDD/SSD Hard Drive Disk, Optical Drive, with 12V/2A Power Adapter

Experience lightning-fast data transfer speeds with our USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter. This versatile device has USB 3.0 5 Gbps external support, delivering data transmission rates of up to 5 Gbps. By harnessing accelerated transmission protocols like UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) and TRIM, our ...

www.amazon.com

You can find them cheaper, but I use the one above and it is a good cable. When I purchased it back in March of 2020, it was much cheaper at only $9.


If you have another Mac, you might be able to use Target Disk Mode by holding "t" right after pressing the power on your broken iMac. Not sure if your iMac will work enough to use TDM, but might be worth trying.

You can connect to other Macs in various ways, using the FW or TB on your broken iMac, and FW or TB on other Macs. Some newer Macs can use USB as well.

 

[Shenden]

Great tips, and greatly appreciated! Thank you!