The 320GB Western Digital drive that shipped with my iMac recently failed. I decided to replace it with a solid state drive from OCZ. After some research, I purchased the OCZ Apex Sata II 120GB drive from NewEgg. Taking apart a 24″ Intel Imac is certainly no picnic. At the time of purchase, I also ordered an adapter kit from OCZ for  converting 2.5″-> 3.5″. Because of the imac’s unique mounting paltes, the adapter did not fit as I had hoped; but, some strapping tape solved the problem and secured the drive (plus adapter kit) into the chassis. Once installed, I inserted the Leopard installation DVD disc and booted. To my dismay, the drive was not recognized by Disk Utility. There is limited information available on how to perform an SSD upgrade on a iMac, but I found one useful piece of information about the Partition Table format.

After disassembling the computer again, I connected the drive using an external SATA -> USB adapter and attached it to my Thinkpad running ArchLinux. I fired up GParted and discovered the drive was preformatted with an MS-DOS partition table, and an NTFS filesystem. I changed the partition table type to “GPT” aka “GUID” which is what the EFI bios uses in Intel Macs.  Sure enough, the drive was recognized by Disk Utility on the next boot, and the installation went smoothly.

The iMac now boots from the Apple logo to desktop in 12 seconds. The application performance also exceeds my expectations. Later, I’ll be testing VMware Fusion as I rebuild my Arch development environment.

UPDATE:

Please visit one of our subscriber’s websites. He has a site dedicated to SSD on Mac’s

http://www.mac-ssd-drives.com/