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7200rpm HD in iMac Flat Panel

tomf87

tomf87

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 10, 2003
1,052
0
Anyone ever had a 7200rpm drive installed in a FP iMac? I've heard of them being installed in CRT's before, but haven't heard about the FP's.

Did you find there was excessive heat or premature failures?

Just to note, I have a Maxtor 6Y120P 120GB 8MB hard disk I was thinking of putting in my iMac 800 17".
 
jwdawso

jwdawso

macrumors regular
Jan 13, 2002
121
7
Current iMac's have 7200 rpm drives as stock.

If you want to keep your iMac silent, consider a Seagate drive.
 
strider42

strider42

macrumors 65816
Feb 1, 2002
1,461
7
Originally posted by Dreadnought
Go ahead and find out! It can probably be done, but will the heat be sooo much more that the Imac gets too hot? Doesn't http://www.xlr8yourmac.com have anything about this? Goodluck!!
Click to expand...

I put a 7200 rpm drive in my old CRT iMac. the difference in heat was about 1-2 degrees and left the machine still well within specs. I don't think a 7200 rpm drive would cause any problems whatsoever.

That said, installing a hard drive into the flat panel is rather difficult from what I understand. Even if you got it open, installed the new drive and all that, you better have that thermal paste handy and put it in the right place or you might seriously mess up the machine. Probably easier and safer to expand via firewire drives.
 
L

Lanbrown

macrumors 6502a
Mar 20, 2003
893
0
Macworld had a whole article on upgrading an LCD iMac. They did the memory in the non-user slot as well as the HD. It was a 2003 issue so you should see if a library has it.
 
tomf87

tomf87

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 10, 2003
1,052
0
All,

Just an update that I did perform the upgrade myself.

I installed a Maxtor 7200rpm 120GB drive with 8MB of cache. The installation went well, and I used heat sink compound from Radio Shack (part number 276-1372 @ $1.99) for use during re-assembly. I was really really careful about using the compound sparingly on both surfaces and making sure that the vent hole was clear. I also used a piece of plastic to smooth it out, although a business card would even work fine.

After installing the drive, I reinstalled 10.3 and have noticed a drastic improvement over the old drive, a Maxtor 5400rpm 80GB with 2MB of cache.

I was hesitant to do this at first, but I just took my time to do it right and not rush anything. It took almost an hour, since I didn't want to break any pins or mess up the compound.


Thanks for all of the replies,

Tom
 
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