upgrade late 2012 iMac while I wait for Apple Silicon

[ravinder08]

Was hoping to see the release of a 27"iMac this year to replace my still working fine but slow late 2012 iMac
I think I should use an external SSD to get a speed boost until the new iMac comes out sometime next year.
What SSD should I use for best results looking to get a 1TB drive
Also is there some kind of guide on how to go about setting it up?
Should I also stick in some extra ram?

 

[mj_]

The Late 2012 has USB 3.0 so the easiest way would be to purchase an external USB 3.0 SSD like Samsung's T5 or T7 and using the built-in tools (aka Disk Utility when booted into Recovery) to restore your existing drive onto the external SSD. Once cloned/restored select the SSD as startup disk, reboot, and enjoy.

 

[Juicy Box]

What are your iMac's specs and what do you do with it?

I have a late 2012 iMac, and it still is very fast for me.

I did a BTO i7, and the 2GB 680MX GPU.

I upgraded the RAM myself and have since added an external Samsung X5 TB3 NVMe drive to boot from.

While the X5 and set up to use it isn't cheap, and probably not worth it based off your post, it is the fasted drive you can get on the Late 2012 iMac without doing a striping RAID.

 

[ravinder08]

What are your iMac's specs and what do you do with it?

I have a late 2012 iMac, and it still is very fast for me.

I did a BTO i7, and the 2GB 680MX GPU.

I upgraded the RAM myself and have since added an external Samsung X5 TB3 NVMe drive to boot from.

While the X5 and set up to use it isn't cheap, and probably not worth it based off your post, it is the fasted drive you can get on the Late 2012 iMac without doing a striping RAID.

Thank your your reply, My iMac is 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB RAM, 1TB HD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX
I use it for emails, MS Office and internet

 

[ravinder08]

The Late 2012 has USB 3.0 so the easiest way would be to purchase an external USB 3.0 SSD like Samsung's T5 or T7 and using the built-in tools (aka Disk Utility when booted into Recovery) to restore your existing drive onto the external SSD. Once cloned/restored select the SSD as startup disk, reboot, and enjoy.

Do I need to clone it using ccc or super duper?

 

[Juicy Box]

Do I need to clone it using ccc or super duper?

I use CCC, and it is easy to use and never caused me any issues.

BTW, it is always nice to have a spare bootable external back up drive around just incase. I never counted, but I am sure I have close to 20 bootable back up partitions mixed on various drives from over the years.

Sometimes is nice to have old bootable drives of old OS versions. For example, I have an old bootable version of MacOS 10.9 Mavericks because the version of Disk Utility has more features than newer versions.

In your case with having an old HDD, I would definitely have a bootable back up, as the HDD could start to go any day.

All that said, if you do not want to invest in CCC or something similar, you have other options that do not cost anything. For example, you can just connect an external drive using USB or TB, format it using Disk Utility, and install the version of MacOS you are using. Boot up the freshly installed MacOS on the external drive, and use Apple's Migration Assistant to copy all your files and settings over to your new OS disk.

Thank your your reply, My iMac is 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB RAM, 1TB HD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX
I use it for emails, MS Office and internet

How fast a computer feels can be extremely subjective. My Late 2012 iMac has more RAM, using an SSD, and the better GPU, but I am still surprised at your comment that your iMac is "working fine but slow" given that you use your iMac for MS office and web browsing.

I push my iMac a lot harder than you push yours with video encoding, playing WoW, etc., and I haven't replaced my iMac with a newer model due to it still feeling fast to me.


I would suspect that the iMac feeling slow probably has to do with mostly the HDD, and maybe it might be page swapping with only the 8GB of RAM. Since it would be page swapping with the HDD, this would seem extra slow.


What OS are you running? Maybe the version of MacOS is factoring in too. Mojave and Catalina do not play well with a HDD as the boot drive, and tend to run painfully slow according many threads I have read.


Either way, I am sure that just adding an SSD, either internally or externally, would be a huge dramatic difference for you. I would do that first, and for RAM, use the Activity Monitor app in the Utilities folder while doing typical tasks on your iMac to see if an upgrade of RAM would be beneficial for you.

 

[mj_]

Do I need to clone it using ccc or super duper?

Neither, you can use Apple's included disk utility to clone the drive, which actually works better than both SuperDuper and CCC since it is capable of fully utilizing all APFS features. For example, a CCC clone loses all deduplication.