When it's time to back your Mac up, Apple has an official method dubbed Time Machine.
When you want to upgrade macOS, keep in mind the latest version of macOS is only available for these models: Note: To see how much available storage space you have, follow the two step process above, then "Storage" tab at the top of the window. These are important to know, as upgrading to the latest version of macOS – macOS 12 Monterey – requires 26 GB of storage if you are upgrading from macOS Sierra or newer, and up to 44 GB of storage available on your Mac if you are upgrading from an older macOS. This will tell you what year your Mac was made, the version of macOS or OS X you're currently on, the computer's RAM (Memory), processor, and which graphics card your Mac has.
I use El Cap for everyday (because of the security updates), and boot into Mountain Lion when I want to run my old Logic Pro and its associated audio hardware, or Aperture (which Apple orphaned on me. This is exactly what I have done because I have some older apps and some older FireWire hardware that is not compatible with El Capitan.
Install Mountain Lion on one, and El Capitan on the other. Format your 1TB internal drive into 2 500GB partitions. If it were me, I would then spring for an additional $30 and buy SuperDuper disc cloning software. This will bring you to 12GB RAM, which is the key (imo). You can buy 8GB of RAM (2 4GB modules) for well under $100. If not, upgrade your memory from I personally started with 4GB (and therefore had 2 open memory slots). Do I read correctly that you already have 12GB RAM? If so, you're done. Replace the hard drive with a plain vanilla 1TB SATA-3 drive. As I understand it, you have a bad hard drive. Here's what I would do in your situation. The proc is fine for everything except VMWare Fusion, where it is a little slow but still quite usable. I have a late 2009 running El Capitan and it does fine. Something for you to, at least, think about.
I am pretty impressed by its performance!īeen using this with my 2009 iMac now for about 3 weeks. I am using an external 480 GB SSD with approx. This enclosed SSD wasn't that cheap, but wasn't all that expensive, either. This is close to a 25% increase in data transfer speeds using an externally enclosed SSD in a FW800 enclosure with a FW800 cable.Īnd with no mechanical hard drive, my late 2009 iMac feels pretty quick and snappy running OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks. With the external SSD over FW800, I am averaging about 94-95 MBps with sometimes the data transfer has gone to nearly 100 MBps! is to run your iMac from an externally enclosed FireWire 800 connected SSD ( Solid State Drive).īefore the external SSD, I was using a standard hard drive over FW800 and only getting between 70-75 MBps throughput over the FW800 connection. One of the things you can do with your iMac,that I just did, to speed up performance from an external drive.