Installing a SSD drive into a mid-2007 iMac

I have a mid-2007 iMac with a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo processor and despite the fact that it is already six years old, it still does a good job. However, compared to a friend's recent MacBook Air with a solid state disk (SSD) it feels sluggish when opening programmes and loading larger documents.

So, I thought it would be worthwhile to replace the old spinning hard disk drive with an SSD, instead of buying a new computer. I still like the display of the iMac. Hence, I got myself a Samsung 840 SATA drive, as it came with a USB cable and bracket hard drive holder.

It actually wasn't that difficult to replace the hard drive in my iMac. Of course I can give no guarantee that this works for you as well. Here are the steps I took:

Connected the new SSD via USB to my iMac
Cloned old internal hard drive to new SSD, using Carbon Copy Cloner
Tested new SSD extensively. Booted the Mac from the new SSD connected externally via USB.
Followed iFixit guide and replaced hard drive
Crossed my fingers and switched my iMac on again.

So far I am really happy with the new SSD. Applications are opening much faster and overall the computer feels much snappier. It looks like it can serve me quite a little longer.

Here are a few pictures of the surgery: