Since the original internal hard drive was reformatted with a clean install of OS X and all applications, it didn’t make a lot of sense to go through this exercise again unless absolutely necessary. I’ll include links to OWC compatible memory modules at the end of this post.

If the external bootable SSD worked and brought new life to this Mid-2011 iMac, the additional RAM would be well worth it. While 16GB of RAM would likely suffice, the cost of an additional 16GB of RAM wasn’t too expensive. While Apple’s technical specifications list a maximum of 16GB of RAM, I did check the OWC website and found that the Mid-2011 iMac did support up to 32GB of RAM. I also did some additional research on the RAM limitations for the Mid-2011 iMac.

I’ll include a link to the Transcend 512GB Thunderbolt SSD at the end of this post. I had found several cases where this drive had been implemented and worked well as an external boot drive on an iMac. After doing some research, I opted to go with the Transcend 512GB Thunderbolt solid state drive. Well, the iMac did have four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port and two Thunderbolt ports so I was already thinking about using an external bootable drive as a workaround in lieu of replacing the internal hard drive. Of course, opening an iMac and replacing a standard hard drive with a solid state drive is no easy task and having it done by an authorized Apple Service Provider wouldn’t be cheap. One obvious course of action would be replacing the hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). Formatting the hard drive and performing a clean installation of macOS (OS X at the time) did not resolve the performance issues. At the time, this accomplished what it was intended for. The iMac was originally configured with a 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 Processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB 7200RPM hard drive and an AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics card with 1GB of memory. That said, when budgets are tight, you’ll need to find ways to maximize the life of your computer while being able to work efficiently.īack in 2019, I had a similar situation dealing with an Apple Mid-2011 27-inch iMac. For instance, someone who uses a computer primarily for e-mail, surfing the web and streaming content will not need all the “bells and whistles” that a graphic designer or video editor may need. Buying a new computer can be a major investment and more so if you need to customize the configuration to meet your specific requirements.

Hard drive for imac 2011