Mostly happy with the upgrade

My Problem

My hard drive failed, and my optical drive was spotty at best, so I upgraded the hard drive and swapped out the optical for an SSD to use as a boot drive.

My Fix

The repair went fairly well. It only took me an hour or two, the only problem I had was a slight misalignment between the screw holes on the drive enclosure and the threaded screw holes inside my iMac. After several attempts to more fully insert the enclosure to align the holes, I had to settle for strong-arming the screws in at a slight angle. It seemed steady enough, and I've had no issues in the month since. Despite that one problem, I was very happy with the outcome overall and found the guide to be exceptionally well written and illustrated.

My Advice

Since you rarely get into an iMac like this, it's a great opportunity to dust out the system, so having some canned air is a good idea before you begin.