Using 2009 iMac today

[Cyprusian]

Thanks for clarifying. Also, does the brand of converter matter or are they all pretty much the same? I was going to get either some off-brand Chinese product or one from OWC. Normally I would go for the OWC product but they aren’t in stock right now. Does the quality of the connection on the converter affect the performance of the ssd, or is this not a factor? I just don’t want any issues once I install the ssd.

I don't think the make should be too much of an issue, although the old maxim of you get what you pay for is probably worth bearing in mind. Just as a possible suggestion, the following link is the Amazon recommended product on their US site:

DY-tech 2nd Hard Drive HDD SSD Caddy for iMac 20 21.5 27 inch 2009 2010 2011 Early Late

1. The 2nd Hard Disk Drive Caddy / Adapter to bring you new maximum data storage flexibility, with the compact portable design. Which works with 2.5" inch 12.5mm / 9.5mm / 7mm Serial ATA Hard drive HDD and SSD (Solid State Drive) as well. With the second HDD/SSD in your Laptop, You can speed to...

www.amazon.com

 

[Kierkegaarden]

I don't think the make should be too much of an issue, although the old maxim of you get what you pay for is probably worth bearing in mind. Just as a possible suggestion, the following link is the Amazon recommended product on their US site:

DY-tech 2nd Hard Drive HDD SSD Caddy for iMac 20 21.5 27 inch 2009 2010 2011 Early Late

1. The 2nd Hard Disk Drive Caddy / Adapter to bring you new maximum data storage flexibility, with the compact portable design. Which works with 2.5" inch 12.5mm / 9.5mm / 7mm Serial ATA Hard drive HDD and SSD (Solid State Drive) as well. With the second HDD/SSD in your Laptop, You can speed to...

www.amazon.com

That happens to be the exact one I purchased! It will probably do the trick — and I’m probably over analyzing the project — but I’m finally doing the iMac surgery today...

 

[Cyprusian]

Good luck - look forward to learning of your success 👍

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Good luck - look forward to learning of your success 👍

Success! Just finished installing Mojave and took a speed test — 250mb/s for both read/write with the Crucial mx500 1tb.

The spinner still makes sounds from time to time — is this normal, or is there any way to get it to shut up?

A few notes:
1. The only tools I needed were a plain Torx T10 and tweezers — the rest seemed unnecessary. The cover lifts off with a gloved hand or fingernail, didn’t use spudger, and the drive caddy came with a Philips screwdriver. And if you have a magnetic head Torx T10, you probably wouldn’t even need a tweezer.
2. The Mojave patch from dosdude works quite well — his video is nice too — good software, good instruction — I’m going to donate to this guy for creating this essential patch.
3. The wide lcd cable in the middle with the side tabs was difficult for me — I wrecked the tabs and bent the tip a bit, but thankfully this didn’t cause any issues. Having a friend to help with this step would be helpful.
4. No fan issues after transferring the thermal sensor from the optical drive housing to the ssd caddy.
5. Installed Corsair 2x4gb ram sticks to bring my total ram to 12gb.

Overall, time consuming but not difficult. The most challenging part was disconnecting the lcd panel. If you had someone to work with you and hold the lcd panel while you were disconnecting, this would help immensely. This 10+ year old iMac will be sufficient for years thanks to these upgrades — all for under $200.

Thanks for your help with this, and thanks to the others who shared their experiences as well.

If anyone has any questions for me, please feel free to ask.

 

[mbosse]

Success! Just finished installing Mojave and took a speed test — 250mb/s for both read/write with the Crucial mx500 1tb.

The spinner still makes sounds from time to time — is this normal, or is there any way to get it to shut up?

A few notes:
1. The only tools I needed were a plain Torx T10 and tweezers — the rest seemed unnecessary. The cover lifts off with a gloved hand or fingernail, didn’t use spudger, and the drive caddy came with a Philips screwdriver. And if you have a magnetic head Torx T10, you probably wouldn’t even need a tweezer.
2. The Mojave patch from dosdude works quite well — his video is nice too — good software, good instruction — I’m going to donate to this guy for creating this essential patch.
3. The wide lcd cable in the middle with the side tabs was difficult for me — I wrecked the tabs and bent the tip a bit, but thankfully this didn’t cause any issues. Having a friend to help with this step would be helpful.
4. No fan issues after transferring the thermal sensor from the optical drive housing to the ssd caddy.
5. Installed Corsair 2x4gb ram sticks to bring my total ram to 12gb.

Overall, time consuming but not difficult. The most challenging part was disconnecting the lcd panel. If you had someone to work with you and hold the lcd panel while you were disconnecting, this would help immensely. This 10+ year old iMac will be sufficient for years thanks to these upgrades — all for under $200.

Thanks for your help with this, and thanks to the others who shared their experiences as well.

If anyone has any questions for me, please feel free to ask.

Congratulations! I agree that it helps to have a second person to lend a hand (or two) when working with iMacs. You can principally do everything on your own, but you need to be careful with what you are doing. For the late 2012 and later it definitely pays out of have assistance to glue the screen back on, perfectly aligned.

Enjoy your iMac!
Magnus

 

[Cyprusian]

Success! Just finished installing Mojave and took a speed test — 250mb/s for both read/write with the Crucial mx500 1tb.

The spinner still makes sounds from time to time — is this normal, or is there any way to get it to shut up?

A few notes:
1. The only tools I needed were a plain Torx T10 and tweezers — the rest seemed unnecessary. The cover lifts off with a gloved hand or fingernail, didn’t use spudger, and the drive caddy came with a Philips screwdriver. And if you have a magnetic head Torx T10, you probably wouldn’t even need a tweezer.
2. The Mojave patch from dosdude works quite well — his video is nice too — good software, good instruction — I’m going to donate to this guy for creating this essential patch.
3. The wide lcd cable in the middle with the side tabs was difficult for me — I wrecked the tabs and bent the tip a bit, but thankfully this didn’t cause any issues. Having a friend to help with this step would be helpful.
4. No fan issues after transferring the thermal sensor from the optical drive housing to the ssd caddy.
5. Installed Corsair 2x4gb ram sticks to bring my total ram to 12gb.

Overall, time consuming but not difficult. The most challenging part was disconnecting the lcd panel. If you had someone to work with you and hold the lcd panel while you were disconnecting, this would help immensely. This 10+ year old iMac will be sufficient for years thanks to these upgrades — all for under $200.

Thanks for your help with this, and thanks to the others who shared their experiences as well.

If anyone has any questions for me, please feel free to ask.

Congratulations on a good job well done! As you say, I have no doubt you will enjoy your iMac's improved performance for years to come. Perhaps, enough time to save up for a new Mac powered by Apple Silicon at some point in the future after the dust of transitioning from Intel CPU's has settled down

 

[r6mile]

Success! Just finished installing Mojave and took a speed test — 250mb/s for both read/write with the Crucial mx500 1tb.

The spinner still makes sounds from time to time — is this normal, or is there any way to get it to shut up?

A few notes:
1. The only tools I needed were a plain Torx T10 and tweezers — the rest seemed unnecessary. The cover lifts off with a gloved hand or fingernail, didn’t use spudger, and the drive caddy came with a Philips screwdriver. And if you have a magnetic head Torx T10, you probably wouldn’t even need a tweezer.
2. The Mojave patch from dosdude works quite well — his video is nice too — good software, good instruction — I’m going to donate to this guy for creating this essential patch.
3. The wide lcd cable in the middle with the side tabs was difficult for me — I wrecked the tabs and bent the tip a bit, but thankfully this didn’t cause any issues. Having a friend to help with this step would be helpful.
4. No fan issues after transferring the thermal sensor from the optical drive housing to the ssd caddy.
5. Installed Corsair 2x4gb ram sticks to bring my total ram to 12gb.

Overall, time consuming but not difficult. The most challenging part was disconnecting the lcd panel. If you had someone to work with you and hold the lcd panel while you were disconnecting, this would help immensely. This 10+ year old iMac will be sufficient for years thanks to these upgrades — all for under $200.

Thanks for your help with this, and thanks to the others who shared their experiences as well.

If anyone has any questions for me, please feel free to ask.

Congrats! Yes, the video cable in the middle can be tricky at first - I managed to damage one in one of my first iMac surgeries, but thankfully they are not an expensive mistake (as long as you don't damage the connector on the logic board itself).

Enjoy the iMac! Hopefully your graphics card doesn't die out, as often happens in these 2009-11 iMacs. That is a somewhat more involved process...

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Congratulations on a good job well done! As you say, I have no doubt you will enjoy your iMac's improved performance for years to come. Perhaps, enough time to save up for a new Mac powered by Apple Silicon at some point in the future after the dust of transitioning from Intel CPU's has settled down

Yes, definitely switching when an Arm iMac is available. Nice that I will be able to pull the ssd out of my current Mac and use as an external drive when that time comes.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Just for kicks I set up an external drive with Mojave to see how the speed would compare. I got write speeds of 5-10mb/s and read speeds of 15-30mb/s. Wow.

 

[trinityblade]

Very informative thread! I have a potentially stupid question to ask here. What kind of upgrades would be involved to achieve SATA III on a 2009 iMac? (if this is at all possible). I'm on a mid-2009 iMac so RAM is maxed out at 8 gigs unfortunately and even having an SSD installed, it still struggles a bit using Creative Cloud software.

 

[Fishrrman]

"What kind of upgrades would be involved to achieve SATA III on a 2009 iMac? (if this is at all possible)"

For all practical purposes... not possible.

If you really "want more speed", then it's time to be shopping for a replacement...

 

[Nicole1980]

Yes, with the thermal sensor cable you don't have to worry about the fans. I've done half a dozen of these 2009-11 iMacs and always used it.

As others here have noted, you don’t need to mess with a thermal sensor cable.

There’s apps that will read the SMART sensor on the sad and adjust fans accordingly.

My favorite is Macs Fan Control > https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Very informative thread! I have a potentially stupid question to ask here. What kind of upgrades would be involved to achieve SATA III on a 2009 iMac? (if this is at all possible). I'm on a mid-2009 iMac so RAM is maxed out at 8 gigs unfortunately and even having an SSD installed, it still struggles a bit using Creative Cloud software.

Gut out the logic board. Replace it with a Thin ITX ASUS Q170T, mod the BIOS to install core i3-8100, DDR4, and do a Hackintosh. This motherboard has an eDP port, which is perfect for the LCD in 2009 iMac.

 

[kschendel]

Very informative thread! I have a potentially stupid question to ask here. What kind of upgrades would be involved to achieve SATA III on a 2009 iMac? (if this is at all possible). I'm on a mid-2009 iMac so RAM is maxed out at 8 gigs unfortunately and even having an SSD installed, it still struggles a bit using Creative Cloud software.

I rather suspect you're seeing the combined effects of limited RAM and an old and relatively slow processor, more than SATA II limitations. SATA II transfer rates are still fairly decent, along the lines of 250-300 MByte/sec read and write (probably less for random small writes due to SSD limitations).

Anyway, as others have said, there's not a lot you can do outside of gutting it into a hackintosh. If you mostly just want to get some work done, that's a non-starter.

 

[BeatCrazy]

Good suggestions here. One hint though: you don’t need the OWC temperature sensor cable at all: install an optical drive sensor cable which is very cheap on eBay - this does the trick entirely. I have done this with a number of 2009/2010 iMacs so far.

EDIT - never mind. Thanks for the tip, I just ordered the ODD sensor cable. I realize that the existing HDD sensor cable has no way to attach to a replacement SSD..

 

[BeatCrazy]

Success! Just finished installing Mojave and took a speed test — 250mb/s for both read/write with the Crucial mx500 1tb.

The spinner still makes sounds from time to time — is this normal, or is there any way to get it to shut up?

A few notes:
1. The only tools I needed were a plain Torx T10 and tweezers — the rest seemed unnecessary. The cover lifts off with a gloved hand or fingernail, didn’t use spudger, and the drive caddy came with a Philips screwdriver. And if you have a magnetic head Torx T10, you probably wouldn’t even need a tweezer.
2. The Mojave patch from dosdude works quite well — his video is nice too — good software, good instruction — I’m going to donate to this guy for creating this essential patch.
3. The wide lcd cable in the middle with the side tabs was difficult for me — I wrecked the tabs and bent the tip a bit, but thankfully this didn’t cause any issues. Having a friend to help with this step would be helpful.
4. No fan issues after transferring the thermal sensor from the optical drive housing to the ssd caddy.
5. Installed Corsair 2x4gb ram sticks to bring my total ram to 12gb.

Overall, time consuming but not difficult. The most challenging part was disconnecting the lcd panel. If you had someone to work with you and hold the lcd panel while you were disconnecting, this would help immensely. This 10+ year old iMac will be sufficient for years thanks to these upgrades — all for under $200.

Thanks for your help with this, and thanks to the others who shared their experiences as well.

If anyone has any questions for me, please feel free to ask.

My replacement logic board and LCD cables arrive later this week for my Late 2009 iMac.

Question for you regarding installing Mojave. From what I understand, there is no graphics acceleration available, as the MXM-connected ATI Radeon HD 4850 doesn't support Metal.

Also, does your patched Mojave still support Target Display Mode? Do you plan on upgrading to Big Sur?

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Congrats on tackling this project! Yours sounds much more involved than mine.

There have been many generous contributors to this thread that helped me immensely, and I think your questions have been addressed by them.

I believe you will need to upgrade the gpu to take advantage of Metal, and there are some contributors that have done this with links to instructions.

I’m not sure about TDM for Mojave as this isn’t something I’ve required.

As for Big Sur, I am sticking with Mojave for my 09 iMac — seems pretty stable for my needs and runs the apps I use. I will buy an armMac this year to run Big Sur. I would be shocked if this OS worked on my old system.

 

[ZombiMac]

This is an issue very close to my heart. I'm currently working on building a website to help people "upgrade their Macs from the dead." For people in the situation of using a 2009 iMac, I'd suggest upgrading the RAM to at least 8gb, upgrading the HDD to a SSD, and using DOSDude's installer to install Catalina on your Mac. Catalina, while slower, will allow for a lot of modern software to be run on your older machine.

If you're comfortable with it, I'd also max out the CPU since these old 2009 units are VERY cheap today.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

This is an issue very close to my heart. I'm currently working on building a website to help people "upgrade their Macs from the dead." For people in the situation of using a 2009 iMac, I'd suggest upgrading the RAM to at least 8gb, upgrading the HDD to a SSD, and using DOSDude's installer to install Catalina on your Mac. Catalina, while slower, will allow for a lot of modern software to be run on your older machine.

If you're comfortable with it, I'd also max out the CPU since these old 2009 units are VERY cheap today.

Ugradable CPUs are very rare, and not cheap at all. Search for T9900 or E8435 CPUs on ebay or local webshops, you will see.
Doesn't worth the effort anyhow. unless you can get one for free, don't trouble yourself with opening the iMac and replacing CPUs.

 

[BeatCrazy]

This is an issue very close to my heart. I'm currently working on building a website to help people "upgrade their Macs from the dead." For people in the situation of using a 2009 iMac, I'd suggest upgrading the RAM to at least 8gb, upgrading the HDD to a SSD, and using DOSDude's installer to install Catalina on your Mac. Catalina, while slower, will allow for a lot of modern software to be run on your older machine.

If you're comfortable with it, I'd also max out the CPU since these old 2009 units are VERY cheap today.

I don't mind upgrading the CPU (currently have the i7-860 on my Late 2009 27"), but I don't think I'd get any performance improvements.

From what I've read here, this original Lynnfield i7 architecture is incompatible with the patched Big Sur kernels, and as such I'm thinking there won't be a LGA1156 CPU that would be compatible with Big Sur.

 

[photogramps]

OAP life Windows user here (and 1st time poster) but just bought two old 21.5" late 2009 iMacs mainly to provide large screens for Zoom video-conferencing and although I've only had them a few days I've grown to like them. Challenging me sometimes to find how to do things (no right-click cut/paste etc) but I'm working through it.
I've started to use one for most of my browsing/buying/selling/email accounts and my Dell laptop is begining to feel left out!
One of the iMacs had 4 GB RAM and I ugraded to 12GB and the other came with 12GB, RAM upgrade was easy but now I'm looking to replace the HDDs with SSDs to speed things up a little so the information here is all very useful.
I don't think I will be doing any hacks to go beyond the High Sierra that I have updated them to but I have installed a trial of CrossOver to run a few needed Windows applications.
I will be looking around the forum for all the help and advice I can get.

 

[Kent W]

With the late 2009 iMac on High Sierra you can connect your PC laptop via Target Display Mode functionality and a MiniDisplayPort cable. Your iMac will be a display for your PC.

This only works for 2009-2010 iMacs with MiniDisplayPort. The 2011-2014 iMacs can also run Target Display Mode but that's through Thunderbolt and then PC's will not work.

 

[photogramps]

With the late 2009 iMac on High Sierra you can connect your PC laptop via Target Display Mode functionality and a MiniDisplayPort cable. Your iMac will be a display for your PC.

This only works for 2009-2010 iMacs with MiniDisplayPort. The 2011-2014 iMacs can also run Target Display Mode but that's through Thunderbolt and then PC's will not work.

Thank you, I'll look into that. 👍

Actually looks like that is only possible on the 27" model ... is that correct?

 

[mbosse]

OAP life Windows user here (and 1st time poster) but just bought two old 21.5" late 2009 iMacs mainly to provide large screens for Zoom video-conferencing and although I've only had them a few days I've grown to like them. Challenging me sometimes to find how to do things (no right-click cut/paste etc) but I'm working through it.
I've started to use one for most of my browsing/buying/selling/email accounts and my Dell laptop is begining to feel left out!
One of the iMacs had 4 GB RAM and I ugraded to 12GB and the other came with 12GB, RAM upgrade was easy but now I'm looking to replace the HDDs with SSDs to speed things up a little so the information here is all very useful.
I don't think I will be doing any hacks to go beyond the High Sierra that I have updated them to but I have installed a trial of CrossOver to run a few needed Windows applications.
I will be looking around the forum for all the help and advice I can get.

You can follow this guide for installation of an SSD: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2308+Hard+Drive+Replacement/1766

Note that your iMacs use 3.5" HDDs, so you will need a bracket.

Further, after replacement the fans will run at full speed as the system cannot read the temperature from them. You can use a software solution (Macs Fan Control), a dedicated but expensive cable from OWC, or this cheap trick: Source an optical drive temperature sensor cable from Ebay, this only costs a few bucks, fits into the HDD temperature sensor port and works excellently. The part number is 593-0493 D:

You can use any SSD you like.

Best and good luck,
Magnus

 

[photogramps]

You can follow this guide for installation of an SSD: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2308+Hard+Drive+Replacement/1766

Note that your iMacs use 3.5" HDDs, so you will need a bracket.

Further, after replacement the fans will run at full speed as the system cannot read the temperature from them. You can use a software solution (Macs Fan Control), a dedicated but expensive cable from OWC, or this cheap trick: Source an optical drive temperature sensor cable from Ebay, this only costs a few bucks, fits into the HDD temperature sensor port and works excellently. The part number is 593-0493 D:

View attachment 1699852

You can use any SSD you like.

Best and good luck,
Magnus

Thank you, before I came here I odered (now received) the OWC cable and little fitting kit ... Project Replace is on the horizon