Just upgraded my iMac 500's harddrive

[spaceballl]

So I'm in the process of reinstalling OS X. Looks like the original harddrive in the mac was a maxtor Diamondmax 20gb 5400 rpm 2mb cache harddrive. That's actually not a bad drive. I was expecting something a little more low end.

Right now I have an old Seagate Barracuda IV harddrive in there. It's a 7200 rpm, 40gb drive with 2mb of cache.

It was one of the first ever 7200 rpm drives to use a fluid bearing motor so it's not too loud.

For the longest time, I wanted to get rid of this old 2001 iMac and get a new one, but now I think i'm going to have it stick around for a while. I'm going to add another 512mb of RAM to get it to 1gb, upgrade the OS to Panther, and see where I stand. I'm thinking, actuallly, about overclocking it. I'm pretty experienced with PC overclocking, and I'm thinking i might add a CPU cooling fan in there and see if I can't squeeze an extra 100 mhz out of this chip. I was also thinking about that 500 mhz G4 upgrade. The only bummer is that it costs $300 for just a 500 mhz G4... Oh well, either way I think i'll end up overclocking.

Enough babbling... I'll let you guys know if the HD upgrade yielded a big difference in performance so you can see if it's worth it to upgrade the HD of an older iMac.

-Kevin

 

[Nermal]

I hope you don't run into the 8 GB limit. I'm not sure of the details, but I know that some older Macs needed OS X to be on a partition smaller than 8 GB.

 

[spaceballl]

Originally posted by Nermal
I hope you don't run into the 8 GB limit. I'm not sure of the details, but I know that some older Macs needed OS X to be on a partition smaller than 8 GB.

I think those were the beige G3s. Mine came w/ a 20gb drive.
-kev

 

[Nermal]

OK you should be fine then

 

[TMA]

Snap!

I did the exact same HD swap out on my iMac 500Mhz. My main reason was to have an ultra quiet system (As far as I know, the Barracuda IV's are the quietest HD's available) and secondly to improve performance.

It is worth the upgrade to 7200rpm (and the drive expells less heat than the 5200 that it replaces so there's no issue there) Speedwise OS X seemed to enjoy it. Not as much a boost as having a large amount of RAM but there is a noticable improvement in 'snappyness'

I recommend reading mine and other peoples experiences on xlr8yourmac.com http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso One thing I should mention is be careful around the CD drive opening when re-attatching the casing, mine doesn't seem to eject discs very well any more.

Anyway good luck to you, keep us up to date of this and any other upgrades!

 

[CubeHacker]

I did the exact same thing to an old slot loading iMac 350mhz. I replaced the aging (and VERY noisy) 6gb hard drive with a brand new Samsung drive. I did try a seagate Barracuda (the 7200.7 line, since the IV and V line has been discontinued), but I was disappointed with how loud it was, and exchanged it for this Samsung 40gb one. From the reviews i've read, its as quiet and possibly more so than the Barracuda IV series (which were the quietest drives ever made). And I have to admit, I can barely hear the thing, and the seeks are nearly inaudible over the idle noise (compared to the Barracudas loud grinding seeks). Oh yeah, no problems with heat yet either.

The RAM i upgraded from stock 64mb to 786mb, and i've been running Panther no problem for a few weeks now. I've never had any experience with OS9, but i'm very happy with how well a 2003 OS runs on this old iMac