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Replace optical drive w/HHD on early 2008 iMac

PliSsK

PliSsK

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 17, 2011
59
2
UK
I previously installed a Samsung 850 EVO SSD into my early 2008 8,1 A1225 iMac using an Icybox 2.5" to 3.5" converter and removed the original 3.5" 1TB HDD. Worked really well. Recently I decided to install my original disk into the iMac to act as a back up drive. This meant moving the 2.5" SSD into the optical drive slot using an optical drive SSD adapter (ATA slot) and putting the HDD back in the original SATA2 slot. I didn't realise until afterwards that it was ATA and would slow down running OS X on the SSD.

The best thing to do I'm assuming would be to move the SSD back into the main SATA slot and buy a second 2.5" drive (HDD or SSD) to use in the optical drive slot, and sell the 3.5" HDD or use it as an external disk in a cheap enclosure. A 2.5" HDD would have worse performance than the original 3.5" HDD additionally as it would only spin at up to 5400RPM

However, I was wondering, is there any way to connect the SSD in the optical slot to the main SATA bus using some kind of extra cable or adapter, so that I have 2 drives on SATA? I'm assuming not, but thought I'd ask. I suspect the logic board has no more SATA slots on it as I recently took it out for maintenance and didn't see one.

One thing I noticed about Samsung is that they produced an OS X driver for the 750 EVO SSD but they never bothered for the 850 EVO. Given that they are above spec for SATA2 anyway, I'm guessing I'd get better performance out of a 750 than an 850 because of the driver?

Thanks in advance.
 
Last edited:
Unless you already have the iMac opened up, I'd suggest the easiest thing to do is to buy an EXTERNAL enclosure for the HDD, put it into the enclosure, connect it externally, and run it that way for your "back up" drive...
 
Fishrrman said:
Unless you already have the iMac opened up, I'd suggest the easiest thing to do is to buy an EXTERNAL enclosure for the HDD, put it into the enclosure, connect it externally, and run it that way for your "back up" drive...
Click to expand...

Thanks. Yeah I've already installed the old hard disk into the iMac, as per above description, but will likely open it up again to move the SSD drive back to the main SATA slot.
 
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