musictomysoul

New Life for my iMac!

Have you ever wanted to breathe new life into one of your Apple computers without getting under the hood? Although I have changed internal HDDs on laptop computers, I didn’t want to take apart my 2011 iMac! I had watched some of the online videos about using suction cups to remove the glass, and thought this wasn’t worth voiding my warranty. However, now that my laptops have SSD drives, I was feeling the sluggishness of this computer during my daily work.

I’ve been engaged in some software testing and have been using Super Duper (SD) to create a sandbox drive! With SD, I can keep my user home files on my larger internal drive but transfer a copy of the OS and applications to the external drive. The purpose is that if the test software goes bad, my internal is in pristine shape. I had created this sandbox with a FireWire drive but I started thinking about the faster speeds of ThunderBolt drives and wondered if there was an affordable external SSD drive with Thunderbolt connectivity!

As I was reading about some of this on the Internet, I stumbled on a new use for the Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter that turns the Seagate external drive into a Thunderbolt drive. It can also be used with internal laptop drives! Was this my solution?

I visited my local Best Buy and purchased an internal 180 GB internal laptop drive – SSD version – for about $170. I plugged it into the Seagate sleeve – be careful as it needs a little support as it is bare drive! A Thunderbolt cable was needed to connect my external drive to my computer. I used SD and copied the OS and apps to the SSD drive as a Sandbox drive. After complete, I booted from the external SSD and took it for a test!

First impressions is that Apps that used to take 5-6 bounces on the dock to start, now open in 1-2 bounces! Not a scientific test but my reality! Everything feels faster but I will need a week of usage to really test this out! I’m having some issues with the MS Office license – it sees the new drive as a new computer and wants a new license for the drive. Not sure how I’m going to solve this except with a call to MS.

Since this computer is a desktop, the external drive is not going to travel with me. Remember, it’s a bare drive so be careful where you place it! The entire solution was under $300 – cheaper than a new iMac or an external SSD like the LaCie 240GB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series SSD.

Read before you buy your SSD, I hear some don’t work with the Seagate sleeve. The one I bought from Best Buy was on sale!

So, what did you do this weekend?