Chosen Solution

Greetings! I have this old early 2009 iMac that had its HDD giving an error and therefore could never be updated to the last OS (despite still working). I want to give it to one of my relatives but it is very slow, and I already bought RAM to “pump it” but I’m looking into replacing the old drive with a SSD instead 256 or 512, but can it be done without having to put the SSD into superdrive like on the tutorial here? Do I need an adapter for the SSD to fit in the HDD slot or not? Thanks a lot.

On this machine, I think a SSHD would do just fine. It probably has a 320GB drive now (which normally should be at the end of its life) I like the 500GB or 1TB Seagate 3.5" SSHD for this machine. An SSD would have to backward compatible and the BUS speed of this machine would limit an SSD to 1/3 of what it would normally run at and really be a waste in a SATA II Serial ATA (3 Gb/s) machine. iMac Intel 24" EMC 2267 Hard Drive Replacement Hybrid Hard Drives (SSHD) and Data Recovery

You might want to keep the HDD and add a SSD, so you have performance and capacity. You can use this guide to replace the the optical drive with a hard drive. You will need this adapter to make your SSD fit. If you still want to use your optical drive, you can get an external adapter to connect it to your Mac via USB. Hope this helps!

As long as its SATA, you should be able to stick any SSD in it. It may have a little extra space if its a 3.5 in bay though.

Hey everyone, just giving a quick update. Today I followed the tutorial to install the new SSHD, I had some trouble at some point as the thing helping to remove the HDD was different from the one that is seen here (but I still managed to remove it), I also gave a quick clean inside as there was a bit of dirt in there! I put it back and everything, and then started it, holding down the option key. I had created a bootable usb drive with Disk Maker X yesterday for Yosemite, so that’s what I put it to install it and then got an error saying it couldn’t install :( I’m bummed but I’ll try making a new USB bootable on my other iMac so I can finally make a clean install, I don’t know why it gave me that error especially since Disk Maker took 20-30minutes making the bootable yesterday