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iMac AL 24" Hard Drive Swap - Pics/Procedure inside

Well one (and hopefully two) bit of good news.

The graphics card PCB is a different colour to the main board and seems like it's still upgradeable. If upgrades ever become available.

The second one is the mention of a DVI port. Although my thoughts would be that this is just a LVDS port. However if it is DVI it means that someone could potentially hack this into a monitor if the need ever comes in the future.
 
Excellent post. The pictures were great and I really enjoyed seeing what is inside the iMac. Thanks.
 
Tom, great post!

Question: The replacement drive you selected, how does it compare to the original WD in terms of heat?

What other hard disks would you recommend for others who would wish to do the same transplant operation? :)
 
great pics for reference. wow.

I had no problems doing this stuff on my G4 sawtooth... I don't feel comfortable doing it on my new imac.... everything is so small.

besides, don't want to void the warranty... I may get the 3 year warranty, so if something goes wrong, Apple can do this stuff. :D
 
I think you should definately pull the lcd out again to make sure its all ok in there :D that glue on the hd temperature sensor mount might not be sticky enough after the hard drive heated up I would definately want to check it out. :p Then while you have it out you might as well check the lcd model number
 
also if you look at the front assembly it looks like the black apple logo is a sticker or something similar? Maybe the apple logo could be changed to something better than black.
 
Jasonbot said:
Can you say no more warranty??? :D
Click to expand...

And why would the warranty be voided immediately upon opening the iMac ?

It doesn't appear that he broke the glass panel with a mallet to remove it.

Nor does it appear that a pry bar was used to remove the LCD panel.

And somehow he managed to find a spoon or other utensil suitable for working lose the Hard disk without damaging all the surrounding components...:rolleyes:
 
Congrats man thats an amazing feat and you'd think perpendicular drives would be standard in all of Apple's lineup now......what they were thinking i won't know

Part of me wants to do this but i can't...the warranty (AppleCare is too precious) maybe later down the line. Also i have a feeling the 20" will be slightly more difficult as things would be more compressed given the smaller dimensions.

Also quite surprised the screens are glossy....i guess that explains the deeper blacks and saturated colours.
 
negatv1 said:
And why would the warranty be voided immediately upon opening the iMac ?
Click to expand...

Ooooh... I thought merely opening the mac de-warrants the computer, since if something does go wrong apple could always just lol @ you and say it was your own fault and thus not repair your mac.
 
Jasonbot said:
Ooooh... I thought merely opening the mac de-warrants the computer, since if something does go wrong apple could always just lol @ you and say it was your own fault and thus not repair your mac.
Click to expand...

Warranty isn't voided by merely opening the machine, its voided if you damage something as a result of opening it. From the looks of it, the guy did a bang up job and didn't break anything. Therefore the only thing no longer covered is his new HDD
 
also if you were to try and remove the heatsinks I think it is you would void it also as they have warranty void stickers covering some of the screw holes(kodawarisan.com)
 
So the panel connects to the graphics card or motherboard with DVI? Is this HDCP compatable? My older HDTV has a HDCP capable DVI input. I can't imagine it wouldn't work with blu-ray and hd dvd. I am in no hurry to buy either overpriced format, but I would like to be able to do so in maybe a year or so if I chose to, that is if my iMac ever comes.
 
mkrishnan said:
Is there any chance you can please replace all your image tags with TIMG? This way, they won't be so huge on the forum page, and you'll still be able to click and get the full ones. They're just overwhelming my poor little work computer's real estate! :p
Click to expand...

You got it! I didn't know about that; nice feature! :D
 
rallycars said:
So the panel connects to the graphics card or motherboard with DVI? Is this HDCP compatable? My older HDTV has a HDCP capable DVI input. I can't imagine it wouldn't work with blu-ray and hd dvd. I am in no hurry to buy either overpriced format, but I would like to be able to do so in maybe a year or so if I chose to, that is if my iMac ever comes.
Click to expand...

I believe it is... the density of the connector, shape (looks quite a bit like the external DVI connector on the iMac) made me conclude it was the DVI connector. The other connector is to the power board for the panel from looking at the components, and I can't imagine they would not do DVI to the panel, very standard interface and the best way to hook any panel up.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
I believe it is... the density of the connector, shape (looks quite a bit like the external DVI connector on the iMac) made me conclude it was the DVI connector. The other connector is to the power board for the panel from looking at the components, and I can't imagine they would not do DVI to the panel, very standard interface and the best way to hook any panel up.
Click to expand...

LVDS is usually used for connecting LCD panels to controllers/GPUs internally. Using DVI would make no sense (whether it's the connector or the signaling interface).
 
jf8 said:
LVDS is usually used for connecting LCD panels to controllers/GPUs internally. Using DVI would make no sense (whether it's the connector or the signaling interface).
Click to expand...

Ahh, so lvds is the raw dig format/comm method? I figured since the vid card puts out dvi they might be using that directly....
 
daneoni said:
Congrats man thats an amazing feat and you'd think perpendicular drives would be standard in all of Apple's lineup now......what they were thinking i won't know

Part of me wants to do this but i can't...the warranty (AppleCare is too precious) maybe later down the line. Also i have a feeling the 20" will be slightly more difficult as things would be more compressed given the smaller dimensions.

Also quite surprised the screens are glossy....i guess that explains the deeper blacks and saturated colours.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I'm surprised that they didn't either. The 7200.10's are available in 320gb capacity too. If it had come with that drive I probably would not have swapped them out; would have waited until 750's come down to $100 bucks or so. It is possible that they use them on larger capacity iMacs though... would be interesting to hear if people with 500's & 750's got the Seagate drives....?

I'm really thinking that warranty is not an issue. I will most likely keep the 320gb in case I had a problem while the unit is under warranty. There were no seals broken and I certainly took care to put things back as they were. I'm doubting there would be any warranty issue (with the exception of the hard drive of course, it's not covered)...
 
Tom Sawyer said:
You got it! I didn't know about that; nice feature! :D
Click to expand...

Thanks, mate! :) Nice slideshow. I just recently pulled a hard drive from a G5 iMac. These posts are a new one....

17.jpg


On the G5, the screws that hold the drive to that caddy are six-point star heads... :rolleyes: Although if you are persistent, careful, firm, and gentle, you can get them out without having the right screwdriver....Actually, I wasn't sure if they were torx or not. They didn't even look like Torx to me (and I did know what Torx is). Instead like six thin, narrow points... lol I didn't realize that smaller torx bits looked like these screws, for what it's worth....

http__manuals.info.apple.com_en_imacg5_17inch_harddrive.pdf-20070825-090515.jpg
 
l33r0y said:
Tom, great post!

Question: The replacement drive you selected, how does it compare to the original WD in terms of heat?

What other hard disks would you recommend for others who would wish to do the same transplant operation? :)
Click to expand...

To my hand, the machine seems no hotter than it was with the WD in place. As I mentioned, the drive is a tad bit louder... that is to say I can actually hear the drive where the WD was indeed pretty much silent. There is also just a slight vibration to the machine now... not something I noticed with the WD. It's extremely mild, but something I noticed between the two. I did run the temperature monitoring widget for both the SMART internal sensor and the external sensor and both are running the same as the previous drive... 50-55 deg C, well within spec. Chances are other components in the machine are heating up the HD more than the HD itself.

It would be nice if there was a program to control the fan speed manually. I've never heard them speed up at all.

As far as other drives, to go past 750gb to the 1tb drives is Hitachi only. I use 4 500gb hitachi's in my NAS and they are great drives, quiet and quick.

The only thing faster than these 7200.10's (avail in 320, 500 and 750) are the Western Digital Raptors.. but the largest they come in is 150gb. They are 10K rpm drives, extremely fast seek times and sustained transfer rates just a bit faster than the 7200.10's. With those, heat IS an issue, they really require more air space/flow than is available in the iMac. Hope that helps...
 
Comparison Benchmark Results

Thought I would post some real performance numbers to the HD upgrade. Both drives were benchmarked with Xbench latest version.

Here is the Western Digital OEM 3200AAJ

< in an external enclosure which choked it's performance: see post further down for internal #'s>

And here is the result for the new 7200.10 ST3500630AS

ST3500630AS.png


I'd say it's faster... :D
 
holy crap it doesn't seem right how slow the old drive was.

EDIT: I see the old drive was hooked up externally. Thats not really a fair comparison
 
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