For those of you wanting to upgrade your iMac without having to remove the screen (like myself ) I have tried and tested the method below and my iMac has had new lease of life. I didn’t want to change it because I love the 27inch screen and wish I could have just used a new M2 mac mini with the current iMac but alas this is not possible!
Follow these steps:
- Buy 64 GB from crucial and a 1 TB SSD with a minimum 1000mb/s transfer rate and preferably usb-c / thunderbolt port.
- First upgrade the ram. Open the panel at the back and then remove the old modules and install all 4 sticks of 16 GB of ram to get most of the upgrade. this is not officially supported according to Apple, but it works fine and is shown to be compatible on crucial.
- if you have a back screen after boot don’t panic, try holding command R on boot and even try removing two modules and rebooting the iMac check it boots then power down and add the final two sticks of ram. (This is what I had to do)
- get your new external SSD and make sure you format it with APFS using disk utility. (Make sure the partition is guid)
- Then download the free trial of: Carbon Copy Cloner and download to your mac. Follow all he instructions to give the program the relevant permissions.
- Make sure you have it set to be a bootable drive when performing the copy to your SSD or it won’t show later for booting.
- Let the program backup your current drive and wait…
- Once done go to start-up disk in settings and it will show the usb drive as boot drive if successful. Change the target mode to your new SSD and reboot.
- After that the mac will boot up with the same files and OS in place however this time it will be 10x faster!
Hope this helps and good luck!
Some Error messages you may experience:
Error erasing disk error number (-69888, 0)
I experienced this issue the other day when trying to create a bootable installer for my iMac from 2009. How to upgrade your 27 inch 2019 Intel iMacFor those of you wanting to upgrade your iMac without having to remove the screen (like myself ) I have tried and tested the