iMac HDD replacement advice required!

[mark66]

Hi,

My 2008 24" iMac (8.1) has been playing up a lot recently. It started with locks up in Safari which have got worse and worse. Often it will lock up to a point where I can't do anything and the toolbar along the top dissapears completely and I have to power down.

When booting back up it sometimes get stuck on a grey screen and it needs to be powered off again. I have used my OSX disc to access Disk Utility many times and each time its a different story. Sometimes the HDD isn't showing at all, sometimes it repairs everything all ok and the iMac will work for 20 minutes before locking up etc and now everytime I go in the HDD has gone

So I think its needs a new HDD! I have found lots of guides on how to do it and it looks quite achievable and I wondered if I could take the opportunity to go to SSD?

However I need to make use of my Time Machine backup to restore my stuff and this is around 350GB and an SSD would most likely be only 250GB. Can I pick and choose what stuff I restore or will it require me to have at least the same space as the backup?

I am assuming I will need at least 350GB so I think for now I will have to buy another SATA 500GB drive and then do the SSD upgrade and data reduction at a later date.

Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated!

Cheers

 

[mark66]

Having a bit more of a search around, it appears that something like a Seagate Hybrid XT 500Gb could be the answer. Solves the size issue and should see a nice upgrade in speed.

Any thoughts on this as a replacement to my HDD?

 

[richardtj]

you can use an external drive as your boot disk. Just set the preferences to boot from that and do a clean install of the OS on that drive. Otherwise, you'll have to crack open the case on the iMac to install a bare drive.

 

[mark66]

For the record, I went with the Seagate XT 500GB, opened up the case and swapped over. Used Migration Assistant to pull over what I wanted from a Time Machine backup and all good with no issues whatsoever