Today we have an iMac hard drive upgrade and ram upgrade. We will be changing the hard drive with this baby right here. Samsung EVO Terabyte drive. Also we will upgrade the RAM. We’re going to go to 16 GB. Its running right now. Let’s take a quick look about this Mac. Its running a spinning drive. R00egardless of the size it doesn’t matter but we are running 4 GB of RAM.  As you can see there so want to go to 16 GB, it is going to be super, super fast.

One of the first things you want to do here is check this hard drive. We are not going to reinstall the operating system. We are going to clone the current operating system. They want to keep it as is so we are not going to start from scratch. They have programs installed, data here and there. So this tutorial is going to be changing it to a SSD. Upgrading the RAM and actually doing a clone and here we go.

First thing I want you to do is I want you to go to your disk utility. Actually when that hard drive in its probably going to tell you that its unrecognizable. It needs to be formatted. So either way I want you to go to disk utility anyways. First off we are going to find it.

Its this one right here the Apricorn, my adapter. We are going to go there so you probably notice if you are watching this video. You probably know about this. But either way we are going to erase. We are going to give it a name. The default format is that right there in the Mac extended journal.  We are going to call this iMac SSD. I am going to type here so the video might be terrible quality. The content is going to be good for you. You can also call it whatever you want. The reason why this thing is going back and forth. This is because I’m recording it by hand and typing at the same time.

We got that so make sure you get the right drive. You do not want to do this to another drive. Let alone have a flash drive in there as well. So let’s that’s the hardest part where one of the important parts here to confirm. We are going to do that. So that drive becomes visible and that should be pretty quick.

The next thing we are going to do is we want to make sure that the hard drive is in good conditions. Actually you can see right here. Once you finish formatting it’s going to show up here at the top. So iMac SSD. So that’s another drive that I have in there that is going to be some other tools.

I want you to go to your current hard drive which is the Mac HD. Then I want you to go to first aid and I want you to verify the disk. Basically you want to verify that the disk is good. Any corrections are made for the clone. The clone is basically every sector and things may be copied over. You want to have it as clean as possible so that the copy especially in this case is a big drive you don’t want failings Starting over again. If you don’t do that it could turn into a headache. So we are going to allow that to run and then I’ll be right back with you.

Here we are back, the disk utility has failed, so you can see that and it stopped. You see down here that the disk needs to be repaired. We are already running into snags and issues. Here we have a decision to make. Whether we want to if we want to run the repair we are going to have to boot from the recovery partition on here. Or from a boot disk to run that repair. But at the same take time we also want to take into consideration that if this hard drive is in really bad condition. Running all that could render it even worse. So what we are going to do here in this route we just going to take the hard drive out and swap the hard drives.

That way I can put this hard drive on a Windows machine. I could actually check a little bit better the status of the drive before we continue to run scans and repairs. These kinds of things because the next thing you know it is going to potentially get worst especially if they do not have a backup of this data. So either way I’ll be following up showing you everything that we are going to be doing here and resolve this issue and get this baby flying.

Alright guys, we are back. What we decide that we are going to be doing on this machine here. We are going to shut it down and we are doing the recovery from the recovery partition. Show you that and if that doesn’t work out then either way we go the other route. Just take into consideration you know based on your end if the data is of concern. It’s not a concern and to get into the recovery partition you want to start your computer. Press option and that should give you the chime maybe. Maybe not.

Take a little bit and if not we have the disk anyways so see if we get this up. So we are going to go here to the discovery partition. Boot from it and we are going to see if it’s going to allow me to do this. We are put on pause. Not just have you watch that bar move freakingly slowly.

When you get up here you are going to go to disk utility. It basically uses the same utility but this is going to run separate from.  I guess it’s like a separate partition. It has so it is able to access the disk directly. We can do it from here. We are going to select the bottom and that’s going to give us the option here. Prior when you boot from it, it doesn’t give you the option to boot from the active partition so let’s see how that goes.

See if we can get that repaired and this will be something that aside from just doing an installation or cloning or whatever you’re doing this could just be a tutorial on how to repair your hard disk if you’re having issues. This is one of the most common reasons aside from the malware and stuff like that that your computer will get slow be it a Windows machine or be it a Mac either way you got a bad hard drive your computer is going nowhere. So we wait on that and see how that goes.

Wow! It took awhile didn’t put a clock on it but it takes 30 minutes at least. So that did get repaired. From here we are still going to do another verification. Makes sure that comes out clean. Then basically we’ll do a restart. Take a look at it again from within the operating system. We go forward with the clone. So a lot of these things look very easy and you say all you got to do is clone that drive and you see that that cloning of the drive is going to be a few hours and it’s not as easy said as done.

And that’s what we get sometimes we get some clients who want it real quick like 15 minutes nothing takes 15 minutes, everything sometimes most of the times we run into stumbling block like this and you got to know what to do. So we’ll let you know, see how that goes and we’ll catch you in a minute.

So we ran the second verified disk, everything is good. We are going to do a restart and startup regular, we are going to verify that disk now again just in the OS and make sure that’s good to go and then we’ll start our cloning. Keeping our fingers crossed, hopefully no more surprises over here. Here we are back up in the operating system and we have actually verified the disk and let’s see how that’s comes out in a minute.

So here we are guys, here’s the results of our disk repair. Everything looks good so we are going to go ahead with the cloning. And we are going to go here to couple softwares that we can use for this but we are going to be using is called SuperDuper this little program right here and it’s a pretty simple, straight up program, it’s free. Actually the basic program is free if you want some special features then you are going to have to purchase it but for our purposes we are going to use the free version which should be a good to go with it.

That’s we are going to need a user guide, this mouse is a little kind of crazy. So basically we are right here. Let’s close it out basically it is going to ask you copy from where to where. So we are going to copy from Mac HD 500 GB hard drive. That’s the current drive and we are going to go to the iMac SSD. So it’s a good idea to have a different name when you do that.  so you don’t get confused or going from there to that to that. Here you got a couple options what you want to do, we are basically going to backup all files there are a couple of different options there and that’s going to copy everything and make it a bootable drive.

Hopefully we don’t have any errors all the way through, we are going to good, if we do have errors it stops we have to start from scratch unless you have a paid version the paid version gives you features to basically pick up where you left off. We have done that before so we do have the paid version. As well so hopefully this is going to work. We are going to go copy now and its going to ask us for a password…your password. A warning you are about to erase the iMac SSD so yes we are familiar with that and here it’s going to go through the motions, you are going to prepare, erase, copy and then it’s going to make it bootable at the end.

That’s going to take a good while, I have seen this take up to 10 hours on a full Terabyte this is 500 GB so we’ll see the elapse time when we get to the end of this. Well, it could take a couple hours so we’ll catch up with it tomorrow, thanks for watching.Now that is finished its showing me there it took 7 hours so it does take a long time so there maybe other software out there that you prefer maybe faster. This is very simple and frankly not in a rush so just let it take its time to do its thing.

So you see it copies everything and then you see at the end there that it made the drive bootable. I am boot the unit from the drive just to confirm that it is bootable and then we are going to go into the replacement, catch you in a minute. Here we are doing a restart and if you’re watching this you probably know how to choose a different hard drive. Basically you restart the computer, you hold down the option key you are going to get the different boot options whether it be the recovery partition or in this case the SSD which we have here.

So we are booting from that and its going to verify that you can boot to it and then we will go into just wrapping it up. I mean we are going through all these steps if you guys want to cut it out that step but you know I think it is always safer to verify that everything is working before you take the whole thing apart and put it in there. Then if you have issues take apart again when of course you can always do the reinstallation or what have you. That’s what we’re recommending here that we just go through the whole thing the proper way.

Even though of course the SSD is super, super fast it’s running off of a USB 2.0. So you are going to see a little bit of a lag, it’s not going to be running like if it was installed so. Right there we are running off of the external drive. There are a bunch of stuffs that sorting out here that kind of stinks. Just want to show you here this utility forced that to close out and we get over here and there are the three disks and we are booting off of…the only way you could tell its going to be hard for us it tell right here which one we are in.

But basically this is one way you can tell which one you’re in when we select that you’ll notice here the repaired disk is greyed out. Because you cannot repair a disk that you are booted into so you see it there that it’s grey if we go to the Mac HD we’ll see the repair there is available and then this is the so that’s just to show you that that’s the one that we’re booting into. So we are going to take this baby apart swap these things out, thanks for watching.

The hard drive has been checked, the hard drive it’s booting from it. The first thing we are going to do is this is a suction cup you can use any suction cup, this is not that hard to take off of course with this suction cup it a little easier this will basically pull this off, this is just magnets. So pull this off, put this in a place where it’s not going to get dirty and then you’re going to spend a bunch of time cleaning it up

What we are going to do here is you’re going to have eight screws 1, 2, 3, 4 and then 4 along this side here there are very strong magnets here across the board. When you do that you are going to find that you want to hang on to these because they are going to wind up either falling down or going to get stuck on the magnet. I am going to get this off and follow up on a little bit.

I’m here down to the last screw I’m using this pliers to grab these screws because you don’t want them falling back this way and if they do fall back here. We’ll find them but you can save yourself that trouble. So want across the board those eight screws that we talked about and this just comes. This peels right up this one is going to be a little tougher than we thought. It has some aluminium stuff right here and it’s not letting it come out there we go so you really shouldn’t have any issues as far as coming out.

Here we’re going to have a few connectors to take off in here. We have a few cables it’s dusty, dirty. We have one connector right here and as well it’s going to come out so you’re going to have this connector to take off. You’re going to have this one down here and you’re going to have the video cable to take off as well. This video cable I like to feel it from here it can peel this tape off and disconnect it. Versus trying to get it off from there because the area down here is a little bit more sensitive.

Then lastly you’re going to have this little guy here so the point is that when you open it up you want to be careful as far as not getting these cables ripped and then you are going to have a little bit more trouble. So we are going to get those off and we’ll be back in a bit. So here we are we took that LCD off put it up over here and this thing is kind of dusty, it’s a good opportunity to clean this unit up.

You can see all the dust collection, we’re going to dust it off and then here’s our hard drive two screws are going to hold it in place as you can see. You got one there and the other right here even though this is larger sized drive it doesn’t matter going to show you how we are just going to adapt it in there.

Spinning hard drive or the SSD really it’s not moving. It just requires going to put some double sided tape on it here today and it uses the same connectors. Also this is going to have these connectors down here in this hard drive. Most of these match are going to have them if you don’t have it no problem but basically this connection right here that you’re seeing right in the middle I’ll show it to you afterwards again. That’s the temperature sensor for the hard drive. When we change this hard drive the SSD is not going to have that so the fan is going to be running full blast.

I am going to be showing you a software that you’re going to be needing to install. That you can control that fan and it gets loud. So you don’t have that fan blowing super loud all the time. So I’m going to take this hard drive out. I am going to clean it out you don’t need to watch me clean this thing out. Basically we just get something for press there. Well in our case we have like a little machine. For air over here this little guy and is worth its weight in gold. We use this cat here to tune that up and will catch you in a little bit. Thanks for watching.

Here we are back and I’m going to take the hard drive out.  I already took out the hard drive screw so I can screw over here. These screws be cautious with them because they will pop out. Fall back into the motherboard and you could lose one. You actually can’t lose it because if it does go into that motherboard you have to find it. You can’t leave it in there. So this pops right out, you got three cables here one thermostat control. We are not going to be using it on the new drive and then set data and power.

You just pop those up it might be a little harder or a little softer, that’s going to come up just like that. We’re going to take this bracket off this one right here and we are going to touch the SATA under there. Its kind out a little rig but it will be working fine I’ll show you that in a minute. So here we are back let me show you what I did I hope you can see that up. There are different ways you can attach this. You can use your own ideas are basically this bracket. I put double sided tape and put some of it here so that it doesn’t move around and then we put two tie wraps, the miracle of tie wraps. You can do pretty much anything with a tie wrap you can see that there.

This is not spinning. It doesn’t have any heat that’s not going anywhere of you’re not familiar with these drives. They don’t weigh anything so we are just going to have the two connectors there. When you put this on there just make sure you got these connectors. In the right direction so they wind up not having to really twist them around. Just keep them right in place. Then this one we’re not using we’re just going to kind of you don’t want it flying around all over the place. This is running through here and its going to sit there idle and that’s pretty much it.

I’m going to give you a little zoom on that and then what we’re going to do there and that’s what you got. So we’re going to be putting this back together again the connections and then I want to show you how it goes. Thanks for following the show.

Again here I want to show you these connectors get this inside. One there I got some tape on it already. And we have the one down here. I don’t if you can actually see it at the moment I can see that one right. If you take this apart you’ll see that it’s pretty simple that one comes straight out. They are fairly simple to do. The last connector right here and then the last one is going to be this little ribbon one and this goes straight right there and I should have just buffered myself so those watching this is probably saying wow terrible but that’s where that one goes.

We are more textiers than photographers so that’s where we are dealing with. I’m going to do is connect that to test it out first make sure everything is working. We going to be really careful with this too that these things does not flip out on you, keep your hands on this at all times, you don’t want this screen, you don’t to flop it over and creating a mess. And if you are doing the camera man at the same time even be more careful. So let’s get this baby up and running, let’s test it out.

So here we are we’re going to crank it up.  I got one screw in this screen here because we are going to open it up. You want to put one screw don’t want this popping back out. Put at least put one screw in there. Test everything out, one of the things you want to test out basically just go in there and run with the motion. Just test the camera stuff like that make sure everything is good and I know we didn’t do any connections. There and the moment of truth if everything worked out. And the hard drive is properly cloned and if everything is good to go, let’s give a couple of seconds.

So basically while this is going up to the desktop what we are going to wrap up. Pretty much is just finishing up the screws, we are going to have to wipe this screen down. Because we have been touching it so much. Usually you don’t want to touch it too much that way you can get going with your boot but in this case doing videos. Going back and forth that’s gotten kind of messy so have to clean that…not a big deal.

We are up and we are running. Obviously if you’re familiar with the machine before you’re going to see that tremendously faster. Lets cleanup all these startup things here, I can just see by the way these windows are opening up that this thing is much snappier than what was going on before. 

We’re back on the desktop and the last thing I want to show you is a software that you are going to be using to adjust the fan. If you listen to this basically the fan is kind of loud and depending upon your scenario. What you’re going to install here is called Mac Fan control. This is a little software right here Macs Fan Control.  I have it already installed which is right here and that’s what you’re going to take a look at. Those are your three fans. You can see the hard drive one in the middle is running around 4400. 

 So basically just go here and click on custom and then you can just customize it right there. It’s saying 4200 let me show you how. If it gets setup to a higher level I’m going to see how and it is kind of annoying. I had a customer this week that was telling me that he was having a loud fan after changing a hard drive.  That’s going to happen. So the easiest thing to do here is if you just want to drop it down to maybe 3500. Just to the point where you are not hearing it’s good at 3000.

You can play around with it just create a constant RPM there. Let’s go to 3000 and if we hit that it should slow down if you can hear it and you see how now it’s quiet again. So if you’re happy with 3000 right there remember we are not cooling down the hard drive. The other two was just fine. The SSD generates virtually no heat. You want to play around this other settings in here but I think the constant setting at the 3000 or maybe 2500. If it’s a hot area would be fine. You can take a look at all your values over here and see that everything is good to go. So that pretty much wraps up this iMac, the customer is ready to go. Thanks for watching.

Have an SSD drive? Learn how to spot a dead SSD on a Mac