I get what you mean about the possibility of the HD being toast, but the 7-pass wipe under the second account only took 13 hours and provided ~250 GB of free space, so I'm hoping the HD is okay...
In the event that I do need to (or should) get a new HD, do you have any recommendations on sources? Sure I could go into an apple store, but I'd rather pick something up that I know is compatible and swap it out myself.
On that note, I am currently unable to upgrade to the latest OSX, due to insufficient memory on my machine, so if you have any recommendations for my computer, I would also greatly appreciate some direction...
I've upgraded the OS to 10.6.8, but here's the specs listed on the box my 2007 20" iMac came in:
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4MB shared L2 cache
1GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM; supports up to 4GB
320GB Serial ATA hard drive
etc.
Thanks again
Well to get to the hard drive in that iMac, you would need to take the glass off. I do not know how much Apple would charge to replace the hard drive. I do know they do not offer upgrades for machines. If you are comfortable taking the glass and LCD off, you have two options:
1. Spinning Hard Drive. I would not personally recommend one if you plan to use 10.9 or newer (your machine will handle 10.10 Yosemite when it is out of beta BTW). If you do end up going this route, I would recommend a 7200rpm hard drive. Your machine uses a standard 3.5" desktop hard drive. Western Digital makes a pretty good hard drive (just stay away from the Blue series) and so does Seagate. For everyday use, I would recommend the Black series from WD. The smallest size they currently sell is 3TB, but the price difference between it and a 4TB drive is only about $30.
4TB WD Black Drive from B&H Photo. $239
2. Solid State Drive. I'm not sure if you know about these, but basically they use flash memory chips (like the newer Macs, the iPhones, iPads, etc) which allows it to load data quicker. This is going to make a
huge difference in terms of performance. Now, flash chips are a lot more expensive then a spinning hard drive platter, in fact a 500GB SSD goes for about $250 right now. Prices have gone down considerably though; 5 years ago a 160GB SSD would set you back $800+. There are a lot of brands in this market, but I have personally used and found 4 that I consider the best SSDs: Crucial, Intel, SanDisk, and Samsung. About 95%+ of SSDs are 2.5" sized, meaning they are meant for laptops. However, you can get an adapter. I find
this adapter from Icy Dock usually works great in desktop settings.
There are so many options for SSDs, its hard to list. But a 250GB SSD will run about $109 on Amazon and a 500GB about $250. Let me know approximately what capacity you would like and I'll see what I can find for you.
RAM I usually buy used off a bid on eBay, however there are so many listings I wouldn't even worry. Crucial is who I usually go with, but Samsung and Hynix are really good too. Crucial is owned by Micron, and all three are OEMs for Apple factory RAM. OWC is a trusted Apple site, and I have never had a problem with their products. A 4GB kit (2x 2GB modules) directly from Crucial
will run you $71.99. OWC ran a test on some machines, and found that they could actually use 6GB of RAM (1 4GB module, 1 2GB module). This model of Mac is one of those machine, however the additional 2GB is going to cost you.
OWC 4GB kit is $60 meanwhile, the
6GB kit is $130.
If you need any further assistance, please just quote one of my posts and I'll try to help as much as I can. Hope this helped!
**NOTE** I'm not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned above. I'm only listing them to give the poster an idea of the price and where to get them!
