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ethanhodges

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 31, 2020
97
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Does anyone know the speed of the hard drive in a iMac G4 1.25GHz? Is it a 5400 or 7200?
 
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Thanks that answered my question. I'm wondering if upgrading to a SSD would make any speed improvements

You’ll find boot times and application launch times will get a nice, hefty boost from the SSD upgrade. A good example of this boost: when I upgraded to SSD from a 7200rpm spinner in my clamshell iBook, Tiger 10.4.11 boot-to-login-window time went from 1m20s, to 0m39s. That alone was worth the effort.

You’ll also find the main bottleneck, post-SSD, isn’t the SSD itself, but the IDE bus. Also, as you probably already know, maxing out RAM is another way to improve general performance.

We have a long-running thread on this forum where folks have posted drive benchmarks, pre- and post-SSD upgrades.
 
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You’ll find boot times and application launch times will get a nice, hefty boost from the SSD upgrade. A good example of this boost: when I upgraded to SSD from a 7200rpm spinner in my clamshell iBook, Tiger 10.4.11 boot-to-login-window time went from 1m20s, to 0m39s. That alone was worth the effort.

You’ll also find the main bottleneck, post-SSD, isn’t the SSD itself, but the IDE bus. Also, as you probably already know, maxing out RAM is another way to improve general performance.
I plan on upgrading the ram to 2GB. What do you think a fair price would be for a mac shop to install a SSD would be?
 
I plan on upgrading the ram to 2GB. What do you think a fair price would be for a mac shop to install a SSD would be?

Honestly, I couldn’t say, but the professional labour would probably be greater than what the iMac is worth.

There is, fortunately, a handy how-to guide on replacing the hard drive for your model, if you want to give it a go. Generally, over here on the PowerPC Macs forum and also on the Early Intel Macs forum (we have a lot of overlap in member participation), most of the stuff we do with our Macs is DIY, as few aspects of repair/upgrade for Apple-obsoleted Macs are going to be worth the expense of a Mac shop doing it.
 
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