We have an older 21.5 iMac that has been great. bought it used.
I recently saw that we are running out of room and I believe it only has a 64gb hard drive. Don't quote me on that but it was small.
I found a kit on ifixit and got the whole kit with the tools, adhesive and a 1tb ssd drive.
I opened it up tonight and where there is supposed to be a hard drive there is an empty space. I'm very confused. I'll keep digging into it but wondering if anyone can shed some light on this?
additionally, it said it has 16gb of ram but as i was researching the hdd I was under the impression that they only came with 8...
finally, any suggestions on the best way to clean this dust out of here???
They made a lot of identical looking iMacs between 2009 and 2019 in the 21.5" form factor, so you'll need to get us a model number (usually starts with EMC) to narrow down what you actually have. You can also go to the apple logo in the top left corner and about this mac. Apple has a spotter's guide here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634
jfryjfry said:
finally, any suggestions on the best way to clean this dust out of here???
Blast it with compressed air.
It seems that it would be pretty easy to find but I only saw one reference saying that if No ssd or Fusion Drive was present when new, secondary storage can't be added. Arrrgh
sounds like I might be out of luck
red_stapler said:
They made a lot of identical looking iMacs between 2009 and 2019 in the 21.5" form factor, so you'll need to get us a model number (usually starts with EMC) to narrow down what you actually have. You can also go to the apple logo in the top left corner and about this mac. Apple has a spotter's guide here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634
jfryjfry said:
finally, any suggestions on the best way to clean this dust out of here???
Blast it with compressed air.
Emc 2544
Late 2012
i believe the i5 processor
Hit it with compressed air. Wow what a mess.
the article I found that I referenced above about no upgradable secondary storage also said late 12 21.5" iMacs would have had a 2.5" 6 Gb/s SATA 3.0... which this doesn't.
im just a bit confused as to a. Whether or not this had or should have a hdd and b. Can I install this new sdd?
My guess would be it has a soldered in SSD drive. Pretty silly really, but I think they did that at one point (?)
You can always plug in an external USB drive for more storage. It will show up as another hard drive on the computer. If you can't return the drive you bought you can even get a simple enclosure for it.
Verify what type of connection it has of course.
https://www.newegg.com/Hard-Drive-SSD-Enclosures/SubCategory/ID-92?cm_sp=lvk-_-redirect-_-usb+hard+drive+enclosure&Tpk=usb+hard+drive+enclosure
Blast it off with compressed air.... in the garage, or outside. Use lots of air.
jfryjfry said:
the article I found that I referenced above about no upgradable secondary storage also said late 12 21.5" iMacs would have had a 2.5" 6 Gb/s SATA 3.0... which this doesn't.
im just a bit confused as to a. Whether or not this had or should have a hdd and b. Can I install this new sdd?
The wikipedia article on the 2544 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_(Intel-based)) says it was available with various sizes of SSD (128, 256, 512), a 1TB HDD, or a 1TB Fusion drive (a 1T HD with a small SSD used as tiered storage). They were also available with either 8G or 16G of ram, but neither was upgradeable.
I don't know if Apple used different motherboards, but it's certainly possible. If so then yeah, there probably isn't an easy way to add the HD connectors to the board unless you want to go at it with a soldering iron.
I bought a 27" late 2012 iMac about 10 years ago, used it up until the middle of last year before finally upgrading.
Click on the Apple in the upper right corner, then click on About This Mac, then click on storage to see what you have. It should say if there's supposed to be a hard drive or if it has an SSD (flash storage.)
Duke
MegaDork
2/2/23 8:03 a.m.
Some iMacs -particularly the smaller chassis ones - use a long skinny unenclosed SSD. It's maybe 1.25 inches by 3-4 inches and has a long line of chips down the back.
It looks like your may have a M.2 kind of SSD in it. If you pull out the motherboard and flip it over you should be able to see it:
iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2544 Teardown
Scroll down to step 24 or so.
If yours does have the above HD in it you should be able to just add the SSD you bought to the spot you thought there would already be one and just keep the original drive in the machine.
In reply to stuart in mn :
I put it back together and looked at the storage description.
It is a 250gb flash storage.
which means it probably never has had an actual hard drive.
now I'll figure out if I can add one but I kind of doubt it.
clarification - I ordered a ssd to install; a solid-state drive. but I also see ssd referring to flash storage and not an actual hard drive. What am I missing?
Basically, SSD (solid state drive) = a large amount of flash storage.
A hard disc drive (spinning rigid platters inside a case) is usually uses the acronym HDD. A lot of folks might use "hard drive" to refer to the mass storage device inside their computer, but that's not really technically true anymore. HDDs are cheap but slow, so they've fallen out of favor as the primary mass storage. I had my previous laptop set up with one of each - a fast SSD for applications and a big HDD for storage. These days, you're just as likely to use a cloud service in place of an HDD.
stuart in mn said:
Click on the Apple in the upper right corner, then click on About This Mac, then click on storage to see what you have. It should say if there's supposed to be a hard drive or if it has an SSD (flash storage.)
Tangent; M30? What variety?
