Chosen Solution
recently replaced bad 500gb WD hard drive on IMac 21.5 built Aug., 2010, with WD 1tb drive. Followed ifixit.com instructions and purchased replacement through them. After reformatting new drive and booting computer it boots up but is running slow as molasses. Any suggestions to speed up the system? Before hard drive went out it ran great. Help!
mmm… Doesn’t look good here ;-{
- Your systems HD SATA port is SATA II (3.0 Gb/s)
- Your Western Digital WD10EZEX HD is SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) Your system can’t handle the higher SATA speed HD. While some drives can be altered to the slower SATA I/O speed this one can’t. The older WD10EALS model could be: WD Caviar Blue. Here’s the info for it in case you can find it: Specifications for the WD Caviar Blue SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s and PATA 100 Mb/s internal hard drives. OK, you’ll need to return the HD and try getting the older WD drive or, you could look at getting a drive which has the ability to ‘Auto magically’ set it’s self to the correct SATA I/O speed. As an example the Seagate 3.5 Desktop SSHD. Here you can see the drive is able to run at SATA I, II & III I/O speeds. The only rub here is the special thermal sensor cable which you’ll need to swap out for the Seagate part (if you go with the Seagate HD). Here’s the different thermal sensor cables: Cable, Temp Sensor, Hard Drive: 922-9215, Hitachi922-9216, Seagate922-9622, Western Digital Or, you can cheat and use the Optical Drive 922-9624 thermal sensor cable depending on the drive you get. And just sticking it on the HD like the older models did.
