After the new SSD has been connected properly, you retrace your steps until you have your iMac put back together. From start to finish, placing the new SSD in our iMac took approximately two hours to complete.

To gauge the speed improvement, we first ran our series of benchmark tests on a stock 21.5-inch 2011 iMac with a 2.7GHz Core i5 quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive, running Lion 10.7.3. After installing the SSD behind the optical drive, we selected it as the boot drive and put the system through the Speedmark tests again.

As you can see from the result tables below, in comparison to the stock hard drive, the SSD-equipped iMac tested more than twice as fast during certain tasks, such as duplicating a 2GB folder, zipping a 4GB folder, and unzipping a 4GB folder. Not surprisingly, CPU and GPU-intensive tests like MathematicaMark and CineBench showed little or no improvement.

Overall, the upgraded system was 40 percent faster than the stock configuration, scoring an impressive 323 in our aggregate Speedmark tests, versus the 227 score that the stock iMac registered.