Recently my 2008 iMac has been seeming a bit sluggish and the hard drive was showing very slow read and write speeds. The current hard drive was a 2010 1TB Western Digital Black. This drive was showing around 40MB/s read and write speeds so I decided it was time to replace the drive. I ended up finding a good deal on a Sandisk Extreme II 120GB SSD from Newegg.com. I ordered the drive and received it a few days later. I knew going into this upgrade that I wouldn’t get the full speed of the SSD because the 2008 iMac is limited to SATA II but the SSD should be a good upgrade over the spinning drive.
After installing the new SSD I ran the same benchmark test that I ran on the Western Digital Black. The speeds are a lot better and are on par with what I expected with the SATA II limitation. The SSD showed read and write speeds of over 200MB/s and programs open much quicker then they have in the past.