Abour to buy my first iMac soon. Being new to macs I have a question regarding memory. I will be buying a 21.5 inch iMac but am concerned that the media I have to store on it will eventually slow it down. Well when considering the model with 500gb or 1tb I wonder does it make any difference in performance. To be more clear is there any difference between having the higher memory model or getting the lower one and a separate external hard drive. Does it run better being internal than external? Sorry if my question is particularly noobish.
If you're going to be storing media and need space to do so, get the larger internal drive. It accesses the information faster and frees up space for other peripherals.
I have a 2009 iMac that came stock with a 320GB HDD. To compensate for that, I had all my media on a 1TB external firewire drive, while my time machine system backups were going to a 500 GB external.
Once I replaced the 320GB HDD with a 3TB one and maxed out the RAM, I have noticed a quicker response to my data and media.
If I were you though(if it doesn't void the warranty) get the basic 500GB HDD, but then buy one on your own from a retailer and have someone install it. You can spend less money buying your own drive and having it installed than if you simply paid for a 500GB upgrade through Apple. As an example, it will cost you $300 to increase storage by 500GB. I just spent $275 total to: buy a 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm HDD, have Best Buy's geek squad install it, and purchase a hard drive docking station so that I could easily clone my OS to the new drive.
Now I don't need external hard drives. That =awesome.
Another thing to think about if you were planning to save money by purchasing usb externals is that the 4 usb ports SHARE bandwidth. That means that if you have more than one peripheral connected via usb, then you will never get the 480Mbps transfer speed. Firewire is of course better since each firewire port uses its ow bandwidth(but you only have one). Thunderbolt of course is much faster, but the storage solutions are much more expensive unless you buy a a goflex external with a thunderbolt adapter to go with it.
