Upgrade Hard Drive?

[JDM2119]

I have the 27" iMac, purchased in August of 2013 (MD096LL/A) with a 1 TB. I have recently started converting my DVD/BR collection to digital and am starting to eat up space. Is the hard drive upgrade-able at this point, or would I need to go the route of an external hard drive?

 

[yjchua95]

I have the 27" iMac, purchased in August of 2013 (MD096LL/A) with a 1 TB. I have recently started converting my DVD/BR collection to digital and am starting to eat up space. Is the hard drive upgrade-able at this point, or would I need to go the route of an external hard drive?

It's major surgery to do so. If you don't want to void the warranty, you'll have to go down the external route.

Besides, it's probably better to keep massive media externally.

 

[rkaufmann87]

I have the 27" iMac, purchased in August of 2013 (MD096LL/A) with a 1 TB. I have recently started converting my DVD/BR collection to digital and am starting to eat up space. Is the hard drive upgrade-able at this point, or would I need to go the route of an external hard drive?

iMacs are not intended to be user upgradeable with the exception of upgrading the RAM on the 27" iMacs. That does not mean the HD cannot be upgraded however it is MAJOR surgery and should be done by an Apple Authorized Service Provider. If the machine has any warranty or AppleCare left on it, doing a HD upgrade may affect it!

I would strongly recommend to begin using external HD's to store large libraries such as DVDs, photos and music. On my 2011 27" iMac I use EHDs to store my 700 DVD collection, iTunes library and over 60k of photos. This is much less expensive and the performance is still terrific.

 

[hfg]

I would just get a tiny portable bus-powered hard disk and stick it to the back of the iMac stand with either Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 interface. You can get a 1, 2, or 4TB drive in portable 2.5" size.

 

[JDM2119]

Awesome, thanks for the responses, I appreciate it. Couple quick questions. Any additional suggestions for multi TB external hard drives you guys like?

I also have a 2 TB Time Capsule, can that be used as an EHD?

If not, and I do buy an EHD, will the time capsule still be able to back up all the info on the EHD?

 

[hfg]

Here are a couple of refurbished LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt drives I have recently purchased in both 1TB and 2TB sizes:
1TB:
http://www.macmall.com/p/LaCie-External-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~9597442~pdp.icbeahb
2TB:
http://www.macmall.com/p/LaCie-External-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~13552330~pdp.jcbafcj

4TB Seagate "Fast" RAID-0:
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Porta...&keywords=seagate+fast+hdd+portable+drive+4tb


Your existing Time Capsule can backup your system until you reach the 2TB capacity ... It may be possible to expand the storage on that depending on what you have. You can use it as a NAS hard disk, but it will be somewhat slow, although for streaming music it won't matter. However you will now need another backup device (it never ends!).

 

[rkaufmann87]

Awesome, thanks for the responses, I appreciate it. Couple quick questions. Any additional suggestions for multi TB external hard drives you guys like?

I also have a 2 TB Time Capsule, can that be used as an EHD?

If not, and I do buy an EHD, will the time capsule still be able to back up all the info on the EHD?

The only drives I recommend are OWC (www.macsales.com) Mercury Elite Pro series. VERY reliable, affordable and they have multiple inputs depending on how you want to connect to your iMac.