Home
I thought I'd share my experiences upgrading my iMac.
I have a great iMac, bought in 2011 for home use, eMails, the odd game of starcraft 2, Aperture and iPhoto. It has been a great machine and still is! I wanted to give it a bit more OOoomph! Looking through the bottlenecks; it was clear my internal 1TB WD data was much slower than many others that are available today. A quick xBench put it at 91 on their scoring system. I knew it could be better. The boot up time was in the order of 1min 30 secs - no long, but my Air takes approx 10 secs and that is what I liked! 12GB RAM was already enough to do everything I wanted so it seemed the next logical step.
I spoke to the guys at MacUpgrades; they had in stock a 120GB SSD and 3TD Seagate Barracuda drive, so for under £250 I could have both installed and ready to rock. A small piece of software called HDD fan control took care of the thermal sensor in the seagate not being supported and I was ready to rock
Once the hardware was installed, I put a clean 10.9 on the SSD - booting in only 15 secs to a full OS and ready to browse - quite a speed boost and an xBench of over 700!!! Great, I thought but what about Fusion Drive, I want a big HDD with all the speed of SSD. Following this OWC walk through I got myself a 3.1TB Fusion drive!
Leaving it overnight to migrate all the data from my 1TB and some tests to do. The new, fully migrated machine boots in 16 seconds, gives a xBench of 391 on the fusion drive and the whole OS feels more responsive. The Barracuda also appears to be much quieter too - which is a bonus!
So, a happy camper am I. Keeping a machine up and running for longer...