iMac G3 harddrive upgrade help?

[MIDI_EVIL]

I'm about to purchase two harddrives for both mine and my girlfriend's iMac G3 snow and graphite.

I'm unsure of the speed of the HD's at the minute, but i'm considering upgrading to IDE/ATA 80GB 7200rpm from either Seagate or Maxtor.

If anyone has any help, ''do's or don'ts'', drive recommendations or any stories of their own upgrades please let me know.

Will i notice a difference ? What about the 8mb or 2mb cache options ?

My girlfriend uses her G3 for photoshop and illustrator work.

Any help is much appreciated.

Rich.

 

[calebjohnston]

I don't know much about harddrive speeds and all that, but I do know that 7200 is the right direction for bigger applications such as photoshop and whatnot. Especially with a g3 machine, you want to get what help you can at helping the program run.

EDIT: Read EHUnlucky's post below. He knows much more about it than I do.

 

[EHUnlucky7x9@ao]

I've done a lot of upgrading Macs and what I can tell you from experience with the G3's is that with the HD's... a 7200 RPM HD is a good direction... and if it has the 8Mb cach or a 16 Mb Cache(even better) is a very good direction. I'm not 100% sure if they have processor upgrades for the iMac's.. but I would consider going towards that direction.

The speed of the HD will only help in seek/access time. It won't be much of a noticable improvement unless you boost it Memory wise or a G4 processor. The HD upgrade will be able to search files or open files faster, but photoshop projects and other digital media will have a significant change with a boost in memory and processor.

 

[whocares]

Modern, cool 7200 rpm drives should be fine (the original is a 5400rpm).
Changing it shouldn't be too hard either.

I wouldn't recommend processor upgrades as they are not worth it. But they do (did) exist.


If it's DV, it should have a FireWire port. If this is the case, the best way to speed up Photoshop is to buy an external FW harddrive and use it as Photoshops scratch disc. Obviously maxing out the RAM is a good idea (one chip is quite easy, the other is a bit more tricky...)


This should help

 

[MIDI_EVIL]

Cheers for all the replies.

Yeah both have firewire 400 and my girlfriend has an 80GB external hooked up.

We were considering maxing out the RAM on both, (up to 1GB) but i wasn't sure if that was going to give the biggest improvement.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to both max the RAM and get a faster HD.

What about the actual fitting of the Drive?
If i open the case up, will it be as simple as locating the current drive, disconnecting it then plugging in the new one, and booting up?

Do i insert the Mac OS X disk before taking the HD out so i can boot from CD?

Thanks everyone, more help welcome.

Rich.

 

[frankblundt]

a good imac HD replacement guide is here - it does make a difference, not just the response speed, but OSX likes to have quite a lot of free drive space to work happily. And newer drives are a lot quieter than the grinding old IBMs.
I stuck a 160GB in a DV (it only sees 137 but it was the only spare drive i had lying around at the time ) with no problems to date. You do have to be a bit careful with overheating on the fanless imacs tho.
RAM is still the first, most effective and most straightforward upgrade to do tho.
You can still pick up old airport adapters reasonably cheaply too, as another option (if you have a wireless environment)

 

[MIDI_EVIL]

Great guide, thanks alot.

After reading it, i had an idea.

Whilst replacing the HD, would it be a good idea to replace the CD-DVD rom drive for a new CD-RW / DVD ROM drive?

Do they exsist?

Your help is very much appreciated.

Rich.

 

[frankblundt]

you should be able to pick up DVD ROMs at an exorbitant price from Apple (i had mine replaced last year - still under Applecare, by 5 days!), or hunt around for a second-hand one, or a DV iMac with a dead screen/logic board on eBay etc.