Internal hard drive replacement

You’ll need to get a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) compatible drive. Your options are either a HD, SSHD or SSD drive.

Depending on your current drive you may want to look at just adding a second drive in this case a SSD to give the system some zip! The easiest way is to swap out your optical drive for a special carrier and the SSD. Here’s the guide Installing iMac Intel 27" EMC 2309 and 2374 Dual Drive to follow and here’s the carrier iMac & Mac mini Dual Drive Enclosure

If your current HDD is failing then you could go with either a SSHD or SSD both offer better performance than a traditional HDD your system currently has. Here’s the guide to install it iMac Intel 27" EMC 2309 and 2374 Hard Drive Replacement. You will need this in-line thermal sensor as todays drives often don’t have the needed hookups for the system to access the internal drives sensor Apple was expecting OWC In-line Digital Thermal Sensor for iMac Late 2009 - Mid 2010 HDD or SSD Upgrade

OK so far we’ve talked about the two possible mounting options, lets talk about the needed drive. As I stated at the beginning your system requires a SATA II compatible drive. You’ll want to review the spec sheet of the drive you plan to use to make sure it lists SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) support. Many of todays drives are fixed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) which will only work in a SATA III system. Some drives offer multiple SATA I/O support (we call these drives Auto Sense).

As an example here are two drives:

• Seagate FireCuda 3.5” SSHD
• Samsung 860 EVO SSD

You’ll note both of these list 3.0 Gb/s on the interface line.