I too have an i7 27" late 2009 iMac, and my plan is to upgrade the hardware and then the OS and run that until the 2nd or 3rd generation 27" AS iMac:
Using 2009 iMac today
Using 2009 iMac today
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Life after High Sierra support ends
- Thread starter grwren
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👍 Impressive plan so good luck to you and hope it all works as planned! I may eventually consider swapping to an ssd, maybe adding some memory but for the foreseeable future it will be as is.
Mine has gotten very slow. Any suggestions on speeding it up that I may have missed?
Backup to external drive all your files.
Boot with Option-⌘-R.
Format drive with disk utility.
Reinstall macOS.
Put back your data on internal drive.
It‘s far less long to copy and copy back data over an external drive than going through Time Machine.
iMac 21.5-inch Late 2012
2.9 GHz i5, 8 Gb memory
only able to upgrade to High Sierra
If you still have your originalhard disk inside, replace it or get someone to replace it for you with a SATA SSD, best of the same size.
This will turn your machine into a racer which will feel as fast asa brand new one.
Same gos for your MBP, btw. Saves you a lot of money you would spend on a new machine.
Wouldn't waste the time, money or effort getting someone else to do it. Just buy an external SSD, Carbon Copy Clone it from existing drive & boot from the SSD, Instant speed increase with zero effort.
Good idea. One thing to be kept in mind is macOS doesn't issue the TRIM command to external SSDs connected via USB. For that, Thunderbolt is necessary.
14mb gpu memory...............really 🤣
Can you actually run apps with that setup?
It doesn’t take a lot of memory for low resolution virtual display. Anyway you can’t do anything graphics intensive in a VM.
Soulflower wrote:
"iMac 21.5-inch Late 2012
2.9 GHz i5, 8 Gb memory"
Does it just have a 1tb platter-based hard drive inside?
If so, you can make it A LOT FASTER by plugging in a USB3 SSD, "cloning" the internal drive onto it, and then setting the EXTERNAL SSD to be "the new boot drive".
The Mac doesn't care much about WHERE it's booting from -- it just wants to find a good copy of the OS.
You could get something like a Samsung t5, or do this:
Buy a 2.5" SATA SSD, like this:
(numerous ones shown, get 1tb in size)
And then drop it into an enclosure like this:
(the cover just snaps on).
Then plug it in and use disk utility to format (erase) it to "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
Then download CarbonCopyCloner, which is free to use for 30 days:
www.bombich.com
CCC will "clone" the contents of the internal drive to the SSD.
Then, go to startup disk and set the SSD to be the boot drive.
Then reboot.
It should "look just like the internal drive" -- but will boot and run FASTER.
If you do this, I promise you will like the change.
"iMac 21.5-inch Late 2012
2.9 GHz i5, 8 Gb memory"
Does it just have a 1tb platter-based hard drive inside?
If so, you can make it A LOT FASTER by plugging in a USB3 SSD, "cloning" the internal drive onto it, and then setting the EXTERNAL SSD to be "the new boot drive".
The Mac doesn't care much about WHERE it's booting from -- it just wants to find a good copy of the OS.
You could get something like a Samsung t5, or do this:
Buy a 2.5" SATA SSD, like this:
And then drop it into an enclosure like this:
SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)
SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)
tinyurl.com
Then plug it in and use disk utility to format (erase) it to "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
Then download CarbonCopyCloner, which is free to use for 30 days:
Download CCC - Bombich Software
CCC will "clone" the contents of the internal drive to the SSD.
Then, go to startup disk and set the SSD to be the boot drive.
Then reboot.
It should "look just like the internal drive" -- but will boot and run FASTER.
If you do this, I promise you will like the change.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Soulflower wrote:
"iMac 21.5-inch Late 2012
2.9 GHz i5, 8 Gb memory"
Does it just have a 1tb platter-based hard drive inside?
If so, you can make it A LOT FASTER by plugging in a USB3 SSD, "cloning" the internal drive onto it, and then setting the EXTERNAL SSD to be "the new boot drive".
The Mac doesn't care much about WHERE it's booting from -- it just wants to find a good copy of the OS.
You could get something like a Samsung t5, or do this:
Buy a 2.5" SATA SSD, like this:
(numerous ones shown, get 1tb in size)
And then drop it into an enclosure like this:
(the cover just snaps on).SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)
SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)tinyurl.com
Then plug it in and use disk utility to format (erase) it to "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
Then download CarbonCopyCloner, which is free to use for 30 days:
Download CCC - Bombich Software
CCC will "clone" the contents of the internal drive to the SSD.
Then, go to startup disk and set the SSD to be the boot drive.
Then reboot.
It should "look just like the internal drive" -- but will boot and run FASTER.
If you do this, I promise you will like the change.
And after that always backup your boot drive with Time Machine ... !
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I've been running off a Samsung T5 for a year. Rock solid. I regularly make backups.
This is a little bit greek to me. I wish I could hire you to come to my house and do this.Soulflower wrote:
"iMac 21.5-inch Late 2012
2.9 GHz i5, 8 Gb memory"
Does it just have a 1tb platter-based hard drive inside?
If so, you can make it A LOT FASTER by plugging in a USB3 SSD, "cloning" the internal drive onto it, and then setting the EXTERNAL SSD to be "the new boot drive".
The Mac doesn't care much about WHERE it's booting from -- it just wants to find a good copy of the OS.
You could get something like a Samsung t5, or do this:
Buy a 2.5" SATA SSD, like this:
(numerous ones shown, get 1tb in size)
And then drop it into an enclosure like this:
(the cover just snaps on).SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)
SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)tinyurl.com
Then plug it in and use disk utility to format (erase) it to "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).
Then download CarbonCopyCloner, which is free to use for 30 days:
Download CCC - Bombich Software
CCC will "clone" the contents of the internal drive to the SSD.
Then, go to startup disk and set the SSD to be the boot drive.
Then reboot.
It should "look just like the internal drive" -- but will boot and run FASTER.
If you do this, I promise you will like the change.
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But, reading it, it sounds pretty simple. I might try it. It won't hurt! Thank you so much for the help! Which drive would be your pick?
And should I worry about this - "macOS doesn't issue the TRIM command to external SSDs connected via USB" ?
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- Does the software you use no longer support High Sierra, and can you not stick with a slightly older version of said software?
- Are you doing any work on your Mac which is highly confidential or likely to be an explicit target for hackers?
- Are you unhappy with High Sierra?
IMO, if you answered "no" to all of the above, you should stick with what works. High Sierra is a particularly good release of macOS—definitely faster and more stable in my experience than Catalina or even Mojave.
You need to be particularly vigilant about keeping your web browser up-to-date, since the OS will no longer be (as strong) a line of defense. You may also want to ensure you have a good data backup system—you want a backup location that's kept "cold", which is to say, not perpetually left connected to your computer, whether over USB or the network. But if you do that, and generally practice good security hygiene in other ways, it's not as though your computer will suddenly become infected once Apple drops support.
I'm running OS X 10.9 btw.
I'm OK with High Sierra. That is really not my issue as much as it is that my iMac is so slow. Thank you.
- Does the software you use no longer support High Sierra, and can you not stick with a slightly older version of said software?
- Are you doing any work on your Mac which is highly confidential or likely to be an explicit target for hackers?
- Are you unhappy with High Sierra?
IMO, if you answered "no" to all of the above, you should stick with what works. High Sierra is a particularly good release of macOS—definitely faster and more stable in my experience than Catalina or even Mojave.
You need to be particularly vigilant about keeping your web browser up-to-date, since the OS will no longer be (as strong) a line of defense. You may also want to ensure you have a good data backup system—you want a backup location that's kept "cold", which is to say, not perpetually left connected to your computer, whether over USB or the network. But if you do that, and generally practice good security hygiene in other ways, it's not as though your computer will suddenly become infected once Apple drops support.
I'm running OS X 10.9 btw.
...huh, where did you read this? It sounded kind of odd, so I did some Googling. Enabling TRIM on any non-Apple SSD of course requires the
sudo trimforce enable command to be run (or kext edits), but it's a little hard to tell whether that works for USB specifically.This answer Ask Different says that most USB SSD enclosures don't support TRIM (hardware limitation), but implies that TRIM will work if you can find a supported drive/enclosure. But it's not clear to me that the answerer actually tested this.
And then this post over on eclecticlight (who I trust to know what they're talking about) says that System Information and Disk Utility won't tell you whether or not TRIM is enabled for USB drives, but also implies that it will work if you run that Terminal command and buy the appropriate hardware. But, well, If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make sound? Which is to say, I'm not sure how the author would actually know whether TRIM works or not, since without Disk Utility you'd have to do a lot of labor-intensive benchmarking to figure it out—so they're probably just making an assumption...
Did it used to be faster?
You might consider doing a clean install of the OS. There's a lot of guides for this online, but basically, you'd backup any important files to external storage (!), make a USB installer of High Sierra, boot the installer, format the internal drive in Disk Utility, and then run the install. This puts your computer in a like-new state (except with High Sierra rather than an even earlier OS, if applicable).
You can sometimes then restore from a Time Machine backup, but for best results I generally recommend starting fresh, and then putting back just the apps/files you actually need.
Edit:
Yes, it is! I haven't followed this whole conversation, but an SSD would definitely speed things up.
I would go with an internal SSD if you can—separate from the discussions about TRIM, USB can slow things down for various reasons. Thunderbolt would be better, but you pay a lot for that.
If you do a clean install of the OS anyway, you won't have to worry about cloning...
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Just to make sure I get everything before I do it, I'd need to copy all:
documents
downloads
iPhoto
photos in pictures folder
iTunes library
Movies
Sorry this is so basic but I don't want to miss anything. Is that all? Thank you!
documents
downloads
iPhoto
photos in pictures folder
iTunes library
Movies
Sorry this is so basic but I don't want to miss anything. Is that all? Thank you!