Out of curiousity, does anybody here have experience putting a Hitachi 250MB 7200RPM hard drive in an 800MHz G4 iMac? I'm considering getting one installed when I do the Daystar processor upgrade, and I was just curious if anybody has run into any problems with these drives.
Thanks!
-ian
Be prepared to go through the procedure to remove it just in case the firmware on the iMac doesn't support large drive size (drives larger than 137gb, or LBA48 mode). If it comes up it will only show up as a 130gb drive or so, and not a 250gb (it may not even come up, I'm not sure). I am not certain when Apple inserted LBA48 support into the firmware, but it was around the time when that model iMac was out. I want to say by the time the 1ghz G4 iMac was released, all iMac models shipped with the LBA48 firmware.
As far as the drive is concerned, I think the Hitachi drives are pretty good. I run several of them and have never had a problem. I tend to have the most problem with Maxtor drives, but every vendor has drives that go bad, so I can't really single out any of the main vendors as any better than any other.
I will say this-- Western Digital drives tend to be a lot louder than Maxtors. I had purchased 2 WD 250gb drives for a linux HTPC and found to my dismay that they were terribly loud. I ended up using them for external drives on my Macs, and used Maxtor fluid bearing drives which turned out to be whisper silent.
2 of the 3 kinds of G4 iMacs support drives larger than 128MB... so you should figure that out. Also, only Seagate offers the 5 year warranty on their drives. Some offer 3, most offer 1. The 5 year warranty is worth it.
300 GB Seagate Barracuda for $100
Why not throw it in a FireWire enclosure? Its really nice to move data around like that.
Here's one for $35 for both FireWire & USB 2.0
Well, the iMac that I have is the rev A 800MHz 15" iMac G4. It was the top of the line model when the flat-panel iMacs were first released in January 2002.
I'm going to be sending it in to Daystar to get the 1.35GHz G4 upgrade done. (see http://daystartechnology.com/Apple_Mac_Products/XLR8_Macintosh_Products/Mac_CPU_G4_Upgrade_iMac_FP_PS.html ) An option that they provide which I'm thinking of getting is having a Hitachi 250GB 7200RPM drive installed at the same time. I've been talking with the owner of Daystar via email, and he says that there's been no problems, but getting a completely straight answer out of him is a little bit like pulling teeth. So given the iMac that I have, will it be able to support the drive?
While I'm quite comfortable with messing around with hardware, the iMac is my main production machine, and it is a bit complicated to take apart, so I'd rather have a professional, Apple-certified technician install any internal upgrades. (I'm going to get the RAM upgraded as well.) That's why I'm asking, really.
-ian