External Hard Disc/Upgrade Question

[skp574]

I am thinking of upgrading my hard disc in my iMac.

What I want to do is buy an external USB/Firewire HD (400-500GB). I will then clone the internal disc to this then swap them over.

My question is what is the hard disc interface in external drives? Obviously I need a drive that has a SATA interface so I can pop it back into the iMac once I'm done.

Are the Lacie drives SATA? I can't find any info on their website that tells me.

 

[Greg_C]

If I understand you right, youd like to copy all your files to an external harddrive, then rip it out of the enclosure and put it back into your iMac, right? As far as I know, most external hard disks are older-model drives put in an external enclosure, so my guess is that 90-95% of them are natively Parallel ATA. There are some external SATA drives out there, but they are relatively new and require a special external SATA pass-through card which I doubt an iMac could accomodate. My recommendation (and possibly your only option) would be to buy a large internal SATA drive that's to your liking. Then you can pick up a harware-based disk cloner like this (http://www.macworld.com/2004/11/reviews/diskjockey/index.php) This will clone the contents of your current hardrive onto the new one, all outside of your computer. Then you can just pop the new disk in your iMac. However, the disk copier may need some bits and pieces (like the SATA adapters). Hope this helps!

--Greg