Mac Mini

[quinterro]

Last week I got the Mac Mini’s big brother: a 2012 iMac 21.5”. The seller packed it so well I thought there was a mistake and they sent a larger model due to the amount of packaging.

Currently it has an i5-3330s, 8GB of memory and a 1TB Fusion Drive. When I received it, the SSD and hard disk of the Fusion Drive were separate - had to research how to combine them. The drive is faster than I expected it to be, but this is the first Fusion Drive I own so there wasn’t any sort of expectation as to its performance.



As is the case with cheap iMacs on eBay, this one has a couple of chips on the right side of the glass panel and a crack in the glass at the bottom right corner. The chips are covered with a piece of electrical tape, and the crack isn’t noticeable if you aren’t looking at the screen at an angle.

I have plans to upgrade it, but will wait until the sets of adhesive strips arrive. I have 16GB memory and a 1TB SSD to install, and have ordered an i7-3770s processor that will arrive in about one week.

One question I have is if the hard disk is replaced with an SSD, does anything special need to be done regarding a thermal sensor? OWC upgrade kits include a cable that appears to do something regarding the sensor, but I haven’t had a “recent” iMac before.

 

[quinterro]

One question I have is if the hard disk is replaced with an SSD, does anything special need to be done regarding a thermal sensor? OWC upgrade kits include a cable that appears to do something regarding the sensor, but I haven’t had a “recent” iMac before.

For this particular model, there isn't a thermal sensor on the hard drive since it is a 2.5" laptop drive. I think the previous version used a 3.5" hard drive, which did have a sensor.

• The iMac has been maxed out with an i7-3770s, 16GB memory, and a 1TB SSD.
• The 120GB SSD part of the original Fusion drive is still in there as a place to store downloads.
• A chip on the left side of the glass ended up being a crack after I stupidly leaned up against it while working on the iMac's internals. If looking at it straight on the crack isn't visible. It's tempting to get another display with the glass panel, but the ones without cracks cost many times more than I paid for the iMac.
• It would have been nice if Apple had included at least 1GB VRAM for the dedicated graphics. Some games that would have run on the GPU won't because of the lack of memory.
• I haven't tried to install Sonoma in it since the first attempt - still using Ventura. Wonder how feasible it would be to install Sonoma to an external SSD, or Linux for that matter?