Ordered a "data doubler" kit for 21.5" iMac...

I was going to install ML this weekend, but decided yesterday to pull the trigger on some drive upgrades first. I'll be replacing the optical drive with a 120 GB SSD from OWC and swapping out the 1 TB HDD for a 3 TB model (both Seagate). I have the mid-2010 21.5" iMac. Anyone have any experiences with this to share? Tips? Warnings? I'm pretty excited. I've been slowly working on reducing my desktop clutter, and this will eliminate the external drive I use for my media library, which keeps giving me weird issues every once in a while. This should also provide a nice boost to the resale value when I'm ready to upgrade in a couple years.

Be very careful when pulling off the glass. That is probably the most difficult part. If you don't pull it straight off you can bend the pins in the frame around the edge of the glass. Other than that, just take your time, and don't let the screws fall into the machine. I'd use a magnetic screwdriver to hold onto the screws as you remove and replace them.

Yah, thanks for the reminder about the screws. They are torx bits, iirc from iFixit's guide. I have a non-magnetic torx set, non-magnetic torx bits, and the kit is shipping with a torx set on top of that, but no indication those are magnetic either. Gonna hate buying yet another set, although I just remembered I used to have a little pair of magnets that were held together with a gap between them for temporarily magnetizing screwdrivers. I'll have to dig that up or grab a new one.

lifeisabeach said:

...and swapping out the 1 TB HDD for a 3 TB model (both Seagate).

Click to expand...

You must have some SERIOUS storage needs...backups must take forever!

Good luck with the upgrades,

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

You must have some SERIOUS storage needs...backups must take forever!

Good luck with the upgrades,

Click to expand...

Thanks. It's mostly my CD rips and DVD/BD rips that take up the space. As it is, 3 TB is a bit much… all that media is on the external 2TB drive now with room to spare (and THAT is backed up to a Synology DiskStation). I'm planning on partitioning off 2 TB of the new internal drive for the media alone; formatting that using MacZFS (reading a lot of great stuff about it!); partition off a small part of the other 1TB space for a small, bootable, hidden partition to rely on in a pinch; use the remainder for the user accounts (to save space on the SSD); and then re-purpose the 2TB Seagate to use an offsite backup that I'll keep at work. I may sell the Synology since I really won't need it once this is accomplished.

I dunno, that's not too much these days. If you have a 500GB music library and a backup of it, that's 1TB right there.

I think the bigger issue is that much space on a single device. If you have a 3TB drive, you need another 3TB drive just to back it up.

Well that went well. Well... heh heh... except for damaging the display data cable. Thankfully there's a competent repair shop in town that was able to handle that. I'm slowly but surely migrating everything back over. I decided I may as well do a clean reinstall for Mountain Lion, so that's coming along. But so far, I'm very pleased with how well this upgrade is working out. That SSD makes a huge difference.