This is by far the best ‘bang-for-buck’ modification you can perform on your iMac. Well, apart from putting in lots of RAM. Best of all? It’s a very simple and straight forward procedure that takes approximately 25 minutes to complete.

I won’t lie, I was actually talked into upgrading to an SSD by several friends, the only problem was cost. Last weekend I decided to finally bite the bullet and purchased a 120Gb Intel 320 Series drive. I highly recommend doing your research before going out and buying just any drive as all drives are susceptible to problems, some just less than others. From the research I did, it seems the Intel drives are a great middle ground in terms of reliability and performance.

Prerequisites
Firstly, Whatever SSD you do end up purchasing, I suggest that you find out if you need to update it with a more recent firmware as not all SSD’s ship with the latest one available. For instance, I upgraded to the latest 320 Series firmware as it offered a fix for a certain issue which occurred with power loss.

Secondly, assuming you have purchased Mac OS X Lion, you’ll need to create a Lion Install on a USB key, see the following guide on how to do this: http://www.cultofmac.com/105527/how-to-make-a-bootable-install-disk-of-mac-os-x-lion/ Otherwise, have your Mac OS X Install DVD handy.

And finally, be sure you have Torx T8 and T10 screwdrivers handy.

Step 1a: Opening up the iMac
This is much, much easier than you think. I’ve read some articles online making out that opening up your iMac requires you to have a degree in engineering or that it was a real terrifying ordeal.. well, it’s not. I’m not sure if the people suggesting it was were just big girls, or that Apple themselves sent some emails trying to deter people from doing it, either way it’s a very simple and straight forward process. The easiest way for you to open up your iMac is to follow the visual guide over at iFixit: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac-Intel-27-Inch-Hard-Drive-Replacement/1634/1

Tip: Don’t spend money on any suction cups to lift the glass off. Just buy a roll of thick duct tape and press it firmly onto a corner. Gently (but with some force) pull it towards you and you will notice it detach. Then simply slide your finger all the way across the top in between the bezel and glass to detach it away from the magnets.

Step 1b: The HDD temperature sensor
If you’ve followed everything in the iFixit Guide and all went well, you’re probably wondering at this point what you’re supposed to plug the HDD temperature sensor back into? Well, here’s the thing; you don’t. What you actually need to do is to trick the sensor into thinking everything is fine. You may have done some google searches and read posts about “shortening” it, relax.. it’s not as crazy as something you’d see on MacGyver, although this is a MacGyver style workaround.

I wanted to elaborate on this step and help others out with it visually, as I myself read about it on several forums but noticed that no one posted any pictures of how they done it, and I certainly wasn’t going to pull my iMac apart just to see what I needed to do. All you need to complete this procedure is a small, thin piece of wire.

I used a small piece from a metal twist tie (the ones you find wrapped around cables to keep them neat) which is pictured here, bent into a ‘U’ shape. What I then did was put it into the connector as pictured here, matched up with the wires. After that, I simply cut a thin piece of electrical tape, covered the wire and tucked the cable neatly under the others near the temperature sensors.

“Why do I have to do this?” you might be asking. Well, if you don’t follow the above procedure, your HDD temperature sensor will panic thinking something has gone wrong and consequently the fan will run at a noisy ~5000rpm+ as opposed to a quiet ~1100rpm.

Tip: Before putting the glass back on, turn your Mac on and ensure that the temperature sensor trick is working. If a loud ‘whirring’ type of sound is heard, it isn’t.

If you’re still not comfortable performing this trick, I suggest you look at a software solution. Perhaps something like http://www.hddfancontrol.com

Step 2a: Installing Mac OS X

By now you should have your Mac OS X Install DVD inserted or Lion Install USB Key plugged in with your Mac preparing to begin installation. The first step is to format the SSD using the Disk Utility, the format I always use is Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Once this step is complete, you can begin installing Mac OS. Depending on the speed of your system, this should take ~20 minutes.

Step 2b: Enabling SSD TRIM support
Once the install has been completed and you’ve set up your Mac, the next important step to take is to enable TRIM support on the SSD. By default, this will always be disabled as Apple has only enabled this command for their proprietary supplied SSD’s. The good news is that with a few commands from within the Terminal, we’re able to enable TRIM on 3rd Party SSD’s.

The TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally. For an in depth look at TRIM, see: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/27/keeping-ssds-in-trim-doing-the-math/

To enable TRIM, use the following commands in Terminal:

1. Backup the IOAHCIBlockStorage file that we’re about to patch:

sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage /IOAHCIBlockStorage.original

2. Modify the IOAHCIBlockStorage file to enable TRIM support for all SSD’s:

sudo perl -pi -e ‘s|(\x52\x6F\x74\x61\x74\x69\x6F\x6E\x61\x6C\x00{1,20})[^\x00]{9}(\x00{1,20}\x51)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg’ /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage

3. Clear the prelinked kext caches:

sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel

4. Clear the System kext caches:

sudo kextcache -system-caches

All these commands should provide zero error outputs if done correctly. After the 4 steps have been completed, reboot your Mac!

To check if your SSD is now TRIM enabled, open up About This Mac, click on More Info and then click on System Report. Within System Report click on Serial-ATA and next to TRIM Support it will either say Yes or No.

All done, enjoy the speed!

Note: I’ve read I can confirm that performing Software Updates will disable TRIM support. To re-enable it again, simply follow the steps above.

In the case of something going wrong and you need to restore the original IOAHCIBlockStorage file, use the following command:

sudo cp /IOAHCIBlockStorage.original /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage

Use skEdit? Don’t like the standard dark theme that’s included with the app? Well, here is my concoction for you to try.

If you’re a skEdit user, you’d be familiar with the fact not that many syntax highlighting themes are available to us. Whilst I don’t mind the standard dark theme that’s included by default, I decided to modify it a bit to my liking. What you see above is what I’ve come up with.

If you’d like to try it out, grab it here.

Put it in your ~/Library/Application Support/skEdit/Themes/ folder, then to use it simply select the theme via preferences.

Inevitably, I have updated to iTunes 10. Initially, I was skeptical about what would happen to my existing library, which consists of quite a few dozen playlists. Upon updating and opening iTunes 10, my worst fears came true.

iTunes 10 offers new layouts for playlists and sure enough has done what I was hoping it wouldn’t do; it resized all my playlist columns. This left me with the joyful task of rebuilding my entire iTunes library, as I was not going to resize columns of close to 100 playlists.

What makes things even more frustrating is the fact you cannot apply a default column layout to existing playlists, it only works for new playlists. Genius Apple, Genius.

Moving onto the appearance side of things. I bet I’m not the first one to say it, but.. the iTunes 10 icon is awful horrid. They were either smoking crack or drunk over at Apple Headquarters when it came time to designing the icon, It looks like it was designed by a novice. Personally, I would have applied the silver gradient with gloss you see in the image above on the musical note and left it at that, without the surrounding orb.

Now onto the UI bits of the App itself. The sidebar icons have almost become a saturated colour, which leaves things looking quite dull. Luckily, there is a fix for such things. I don’t have an issue with the traffic lights being vertical, although some will argue it disrupts what the end-user is familiar to.

Apart from the things I’ve mentioned above, I don’t really have any other problems with iTunes 10. Apple, insert an option to resize all playlist columns!

I recently picked up a 27″ iMac and I have to say this thing is just epic. Seeing as I’ve owned my 24″ since mid 2007, I decided to make this upgrade worthwhile and got the top-of-the-line 2.8GHz Quad Core i7. Ohhh baby!

The Display
This thing is big and looks astounding, especially with the 2560×1440 resolution. Did I mention it’s stupidly bright? The LCD is pretty much the primary reason I held off buying the 27″ for a while due to all the reports on the LCD flickering, yellow tinge and other problems. Upon initial inspection, my LCD has 100% perfect pixels and doesn’t exhibit the yellow tinge. However, the bottom right hand corner does suffer from some back light bleed. But to be honest, it is only really noticeable on black and hardly worth returning for.

Another thing I have also noticed, although very minor is that the LCD does exhibit signs of the screen door effect

The Magic Mouse
At first I was skeptical using the magic mouse as there was quite a bit of mixed feedback. But I must say, after a few hours of putting it through its pace, I quite enjoy using it. The only question I asked myself was, what am I supposed to middle click with? Well, after a few minutes of searching Google the answer became apparent in the form of MagicPrefs which allows you to add, customise and configure multiple gestures for the mouse. Problem solved.

The Keyboard
I’m not entirely a huge fan of the wireless, numeric pad-less keyboard, but seeing as it is wireless I’ve decided to keep it. The keys are nice, just like the initial release of the newer Apple keyboards. One thing that takes getting used to is using the function key to forward delete and page down. Apart from that, I have no real gripes.

The Performance
The Quad Core iMac flies. Everything is very snappy. Whilst I don’t do any video editing, applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator open blazingly fast and are super responsive. I usually have a lot of applications running at once and experience no performance loss or system slowdowns.

If you’re in the market for a new Mac, definitely have a look and play with the 27″ iMac.

With the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard came a new Exposé selection border and quite frankly the default one was, well.. ugly.

Soon enough, the MacThemes forum was bombarded with several different iterations of newer, sexier looking Exposé selection borders.

The set that stood out to me was created by TheSpaz. Yes, this is old news but I had trouble sourcing the files and thought I’d host them here for anyone who may be looking for them. Install into: System > Library > Core Services > Dock > Contents > Resources

Click to download

Such a painful task.. A while ago, some lovely people wrote an NTFS Driver for Mac OS X that allows you to mount, read and write to NTFS drives natively. It’s great if you just need to transfer a few files off a drive. The problem begins when you’re transferring larger files, it’s painfully slow. Yes, emphasis on the word pain in case you missed it.

So, this afternoon I guess I found a solution to my problem. The only problem within my solution is that it requires Parallels Desktop or similar.

If you have said software installed, the solution is simple. Open up Parallels, go to the Virtual Machine configuration. From there click on Shared Folders, check Access Windows folders from Mac, then check Mount virtual disks to Mac OS X Desktop. That’s all there is to it.

From there, mount the external NTFS formatted drive from within Parallels and you’ll also see it appear on your Mac desktop. Then just simply drag the files over from your Mac OS X installation to the virtual drive. While it’s not the most ideal method and as tedious as this task is, it seems to yield much faster results.

If this method worked for you, leave a comment and let me know if the time taken to copy files over was any better.

Update: Then I found NTFS for Mac OS X by Paragon Software which has pretty much solved the problem altogether.

On Wednesday, a thought popped into my head: “You need to make use of the second Seagate 200Gb hard drive you have sitting in the garage doing nothing”. I have been looking around for one of these enclosures for quite some time now, but for the price most retailers had them listed, I chose to pass each time.

It was my lucky day, I found it on special for $149 with $17 shipping, so out came the credit card and that was that. The enclosure arrived this morning at work, so I painfully had to wait the day out to make use of it. What does the enclosure feature?

Capacity:
Two 3.5″ SATA I / SATA II Hard Drives.
Data Transfer:
FireWire 400: Up to 400Mb/s, FireWire 800: Up to 800Mb/s and USB 2.0: Up to 480Mb/s.
Operating Modes:
JBOD, Raid 0 or single drives.
Chipset:
Oxford 924DSB.

Setup was pretty simple and took probably 10 minutes at most. I have chosen to use the hard drives in Raid 0, striping mode. The enclosure is connected to my iMac using FireWire 800. The improved transfer speeds are definitely noticeable, I transferred over 59Gb of data in 17 minutes – which for me, is quite impressive.

The only minor issue I see if the fan at the rear of the enclosure, which does have a rather elevated ‘hum’ probably because it runs at 6000rpm or so. I’ll be looking at getting a quieter replacement in the coming days. In closing, if you are after a stylish, dual bay hard drive enclosure – don’t pass this one up.

1/10/10 more on the fan. Earlier in the year, I purchased a low rpm fan too keep the noise down, but this needed the connectors rewired. It ran its course, then the bearing started failing so recently, I removed it altogether. I now have two WD Green 1.5TB drives in the bay and there is really no issue with heat.