Microcenter and iMac hard drive installations.

[agentm925]

Hey folks, my wife and I want to upgrade our 2011 iMac to a possible sad and do not want to risk doing it ourselves. We were quoted about 129 to have it done at our Houston area microcenter and was wondering if anyone else have had this done before by them?

We also have a MBP and a retina MBP and about 900gb between us on these laptops. We would like to make the iMac the main storage hub for our photos and media as well as be able to run windows 8 for 3ds max so maybe a multiple hard drive iMac would be more feasible?

Any experience or recommendations?

 

[old-wiz]

Why not just use external HDDs? I have a pair attached to my iMac and share them over the house network. This is much safer than letting some possibly inexperienced tech damage or wreck your iMac.

P.S. Apple will not update the HDD post-sale.

 

[zackkmac]

Hey folks, my wife and I want to upgrade our 2011 iMac to a possible sad and do not want to risk doing it ourselves. We were quoted about 129 to have it done at our Houston area microcenter and was wondering if anyone else have had this done before by them?

We also have a MBP and a retina MBP and about 900gb between us on these laptops. We would like to make the iMac the main storage hub for our photos and media as well as be able to run windows 8 for 3ds max so maybe a multiple hard drive iMac would be more feasible?

Any experience or recommendations?

If this iMac is going to be a large storage hub, then in I'd recommend either two high-capacity SSDs (but that can get quite expensive) or doing a Fusion Drive setup. You may have to remove the optical drive, but you can always put it in a USB enclosure for external use. But some iMacs do have room and an extra SATA setup for a second 2.5" HDD or SSD without removing the optical drive, if what I've read is true. If you do the Fusion Drive, then you'd get a large capacity HDD drive (try 3TB or 4TB) paired with a smaller SSD (128GB or 256GB).

Then, once you "fuse" them with some Terminal commands, you get the speediness of an SSD with the large storage capacity of the HDD without having to pay an extremely high amount.

 

[agentm925]

Thanks all. I decided to get a 4tb harddrive (western digital green) to upgrade my time capsule again from 2tb to 4tb. The 2tb drive I will use to replace the 1tb drive in another enclosure we were also using for backups.

This enclosure will then be repurposed as a media drive for our iTunes and iPhoto media and continue to be connected to the iMac via USB. This aspect I am most nervous about because our iTunes and iPhoto libraries are multiple years old and rather large. I will continue to explore a redundancy option for peace of mind. But it should free up some space for us to both use the iMac for that delicious screen space.