Choose “Ignore” when you are prompted to initialise the disk you just connected.Using the drive copy station, connect the SSD drive to the computer via USB.Ensure that you are logged in and have administrative rights on the account you normally use.Ensure the current system has *all* software and OS updates applied.Have a *FULL* backup of the system – in my case this was on an Apple Time Capsule.Before we do anything we must ensure that… The most important thing I wanted to achieve was to preserve all of my data and never have a single point of failure for my data throughout the entire procedure. I am not saying this is either the only way or the right way, its the way I used and it worked for me. The following outlines the various commands and steps I took to make this work. WARNING: This is an EPIC video at 1hr 20mins so only watch if you are really interested and have some time on your hands 🙂 The whole modification to the computer is 100% reversible. The SSD drive had to be installed with double-sided tape but being so small and light this was the best solution. The 2TB drive was a perfect physical fit but did not have a compatible on board temperature sensor so I had to fashion one from a transistor, I used a TO-92 2N2907 and used the base-emiter junction as a silicone temperature sensor. Western Digital Green 2TB – 6 Gb/s 64Mb Cache.They offered to replace the drive some time back but I refused as it was inconvenient to be without my computer for a week, let alone the hassle of taking it to and collecting it from an apple store. I removed a Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB drive which is still in working condition, despite being one of the drives on a recall by Apple.

This is the longest video and the longest blog article I have written to date, and thats reflective of how much there is to cover – is not a simple task. I cover new disk preparation, computer tear down, SATA adaptation, HDD temperature sensor hack and data moving, and data and account recovery.

Plenty of gotcha’s along the way – I had to work out and do a few ad-hoc adaptations. Despite Apple’s best effort to limit my upgrade options I manage to upgrade it to include a 250GB Solid Sate Drive (SSD) plus a 2TB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and get my system back to its last working state but with lots more disk space and much faster boot and application load times. My 2010 27″ 1TB iMac ran out of disk space because of the video content I was creating.

Imac 27 late 2013 disassembly