Hey everybody in this video I'm going to show you how to make an old iMac just like this
one run much faster.
So up until last week Apple has been selling iMacs with old spinning hard drives which
is absolutely crazy, it's a scam and essentially that means that this tutorial will work for
anyone with a 2012 iMac all the way up until a 2019 iMac, in fact if you bought a 2019
iMac last month, you're going to find this tutorial helpful too.
So this is the old family computer, it has all the trimmings of a family computer we
got signage showing where the wi-fi symbol is.
We've clearly used the chin of it as a notice board so this is been an iMac that's been,
it's been through a lot we'll just say.
Check out this startup test as you're going to see the iMac is incredibly slow.
It will take two and a half minutes for the iMac to get to the login screen.
And it'll take an additional 20 seconds to login to the profile giving it a total of
a 3 minute startup time which is absolutely insane.
And using the computer, the performance is not any better - it took 20 seconds for Google
Chrome to load.
What we're essentially going to do is put an SSD inside the iMac, now iMacs are very
very hard to upgrade because they are all in ones so we're actually not technically
going to put this inside the iMac instead we're going to use an external SSD enclosure
like this one that is powered by USB, now that's the reason why it has to be a 2012
iMac or newer because your iMac has to have USB 3.0 ports, if the USB ports are 2.0 you're
not going to get a speed increase.
So for this video we're going with the cheapest option possible which was like an external
USB enclosure which I got from Amazon for about 15 quid, if you've more money to spend
I would recommend you get a proper external SSD like one of these from Sandisk or Samsung,
the reason why is it's not going to be more reliable but their probably going to be a
lot faster and they probably are going to be a lot more reliable because the manufacturer
had complete control over it where as we're really mixing and matching brands here and
different things; for example if you have a 2019 iMac or one of the newer iMacs where
you know you've recently spent a lot of money on it and you're not getting performance,
then I highly recommend you get one of these proper USB SSD's but if you have a really
old iMac like a 2012 or 2013, then going the route with an external SSD and enclosure is
absolutely fine, it's a great way to save some money and obviously boost the performance
of the iMac.
Also while it might sound daunting to have an external hard drive powering your iMac
on the outside; these are so light weight you can do a lot of things for example you
could put velcro on to these and literally attach it to the back of the iMac so it's
always going to be on it, particularly if you use one of the smaller SSD's I recommended.
So before we go ahead and install anything lets make sure the SSD plays nice with the
iMac so we're going to go ahead and plug it in now and hopefully an external hard drive
should pop up on the desktop so that one just has, it's my old hard drive which means I
need to format it first but obviously if you buy a new one it should be good to go.
Open disk utility, make sure you select the external hard drive under the external tab,
hit erase - give the hard drive a name and then press erase.
One last thing you should check is inside the system information profiler is that the
hard drive is running at 3.0 speeds which is what you want and as we can see here it
is as the speed is up to 5 gigabytes a seconds so this hard drive will give us fast performance.
We're done on the desktop so go ahead and turn the computer off.
Now that we know the external hard drive is working the next step is to install the new
mac OS 10 operating system onto your external hard drive, that's going to be much faster
so the way to do this is, i'm using a pc keyboard but if you have your Apple keyboard it's command,
alt R and if your on a Windows keyboard it's the Windows symbol, alt and R so once we turn
it on we are going to hit these 3 keys immediately.
So I'm holding the 3 keys down and very shortly you should see that an internet symbol will
pop up.
So as you can see it says starting internet recovery this may take a while there are other
ways to go about it you could put mac OS 10 onto an external USB thumb drive depending
on the speed of your internet connection this may take a while so do be patient.
When it's finished loading you will be greeted with this screen here you can do different
things if you haven't already formatted the hard drive you can open up disk utility and
format it however we already done that, if you have a time machine backup you can also
restore that onto your new external hard drive but we're going to go ahead and do a clean
install of the operating system.
Since I recommend doing this on a 2012 iMac or newer it should automatically update to
macOS Catalina which is the latest version of macOS 10.
Follow the instructions and here you should see your new external hard drive you can see
that it's symbolised by the orange icon, do not select your old hard drive you want to
select the new one.
Press it and then just press install.
The latest version of macOS will be installing on to your new external SSD the first time
the iMac restarts it might accidentally restart into your old hard drive so hold the option
key when the chime hits and then select the external hard drive.
It'll keep installing but do be patient this will take a while.
Eventually you'll be welcomed with this screen so select the country that you're in along
with all your other details, follow the instructions - agree - create a user account the iMac will
be eventually setup and you should see this all going well you should find yourself back
on the desktop with a brand new installation of mac os catalina on your external USB SSD
drive it is so much faster than the internal hard drive and wait until you see the results
for yourself doing the same startup test you're going to be surprised by how quickly this
computer turns on as your about to see we're going to reach the login screen in about 34
seconds amazingly it'll only take 40 seconds for the computer to start up, a vast improvement
from the original 3 minutes from the internal hard drive in addition the computer is much
faster Google Chrome loads instantly for example so yeah it's much faster like just even popping
around opening up different things it's just everything's smoother there's no way to describe
it it's pretty shocking that Apple has been still putting those really slow hard drives
inside their iMacs for years now all the way up until basically last week and that's just
absolutely insane to me so again if you have a 2012 iMac or a newer all the way up until
2019 this will work for you this was a great solution because ultimately these are still
really fast machines they have quad core processors, 8 gigs of ram the hard drive was like a huge
bottleneck like unbelievable bottle neck that probably made your computer feel really ancient
where as we can see here it's just going really smooth, really fast, so yeah if your unfortunate
and you bought your iMac off the shelve and you didn't configure it to have an SSD on
the inside then this is a great solution to have SSDs speeds on an iMac without having
to open it up and go through that whole intense process so this has been a great solution
for our family desktop it's extended it's life span by at least another 3 years we'll
probably wait for Apple to come out with the new iMacs with the Apple processors then upgrade
but yeah like this Computer was like nearly ready to be thrown out and this SSD has just
completely transformed it so it really does change a lot of things and I think overall
this solution has cost me about 35 euro it was very inexpensive and the results were
just amazing
if you're going to follow this tutorial too do leave a comment below and let me know and
if there's anything I can do to help you I'll be sure to do that and also subscribe to the
channel and hit the bell to stay tuned for future videos but thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you all in my next one - bye