[Matt2Dope]

i have an emac 1.25 combodrive
and i was wondering is it possible to put a 250 gb hdd in place of the 40 gb hdd ive got also i want to upgrade the combodrive to a plextor px-712a. do i have to remove the face plate thats on the actuall drive tray. also i want to upgrade the memory from 256 to one gig is that what im stuck with or can you put 2 gigs. i like to use kingston memory and they have apple specific modules will these work?

[Jacke]

Originally posted by Matt2Dope:
i have an emac 1.25 combodrive
and i was wondering is it possible to put a 250 gb hdd in place of the 40 gb hdd ive got also i want to upgrade the combodrive to a plextor px-712a. do i have to remove the face plate thats on the actuall drive tray. also i want to upgrade the memory from 256 to one gig is that what im stuck with or can you put 2 gigs. i like to use kingston memory and they have apple specific modules will these work?

I do think it's possible to do what you're asking. A quick Googling turned up this page that deals with it. Not too detailed about the disassembly itself, but it might be a starting point. But I wouldn't recommend overclocking it, and if it's bought in '04 you'd break any warranty you have left by opening it up. The RAM does seem to be upgradable to 2 gigs according to this page, although I do think that 1 gig would be enough unless you do heavy image/video editing (on the other hand, you can never have too much RAM ).

[Matt2Dope]

see this is what i want to do
emac combodrive 1.25ghz 40gb hdd 256mb ram airport extreme app enrollment kit

1 gig of ram kingston kta-g4333/512*2
western digital WD2500JB 250 gb hdd
plextor px-712a dvd-rw

then reinstall osx 10.3.5

i havent purchaced anything yet but i want to buy hdd dvd-rw and ram first

will this void the waranty if i get the APP... the apple rep at compusa said no but they wont cover the drives but i want to know for sure if everything will work before i get anything. i dont see why the hard drive would be limited to 160 that makes no sense.


PS this will be my fist apple in 16 years i had a apple IIgs in 1988 and now im coming home pluse my wife thinks its cute

[Luca Rescigno]

Wait, you haven't bought the eMac yet? Get the Superdrive eMac if you want it. You can also BTO a 160 GB hard drive, although the price for the upgrade is pretty steep compared to what they cost to buy separately.

I guess if you're already planning on replacing the hard drive you may as well save money and get the Combo version, and use a third party DVD burner as well. If you do get a DVD burner, though, get a Pioneer DVR-107D, not a Plextor. Plextor's Mac support is poor and it probably won't work properly. And buy all your stuff from NewEgg.com.

[Matt2Dope]

all this is well and good but will it actually support 2 gigs of ram? by the way mac rep said it would only support a 148 gb hard drive so if you order one with a 160 gig hard drive its over kill and only uses 148.9 gigs... and thats true cause i saw my buddys mac today and he ordered his with the 160gig drive and its only 148.9 gigs of space avalable... thats so dumb i could scream how cheap.

[Matt2Dope]

http://www.plextor.com/english/suppo...ng_system.html


at the bottom of the page is the mca compatibility

[Jacke]

Originally posted by Matt2Dope:
by the way mac rep said it would only support a 148 gb hard drive so if you order one with a 160 gig hard drive its over kill and only uses 148.9 gigs... and thats true cause i saw my buddys mac today and he ordered his with the 160gig drive and its only 148.9 gigs of space avalable... thats so dumb i could scream how cheap

I honestly don't think this is true... I think the size differences is simply due to the different way that drive capacity is reported by the manufacturer.
From Accelerate Your Mac: "...all drive Vendor's rate drive capacity using base 10/decimal (1K = 1000) and the computer uses binary numbering system (1K = 1024). The difference adds up when you dealing with gigabytes. (there's some space taken by formatting, drivers, etc. but the primary reason for the large difference in the drive's "rated" capacity vs actual reported (by the computer) capacity is the numbering system used."
You can search the drive database for lots of more info on hard drives.

I also found a link to a Japanese page with pictures of an eMac take-apart here.

[megasad]

Originally posted by Matt2Dope:
all this is well and good but will it actually support 2 gigs of ram? by the way mac rep said it would only support a 148 gb hard drive so if you order one with a 160 gig hard drive its over kill and only uses 148.9 gigs... and thats true cause i saw my buddys mac today and he ordered his with the 160gig drive and its only 148.9 gigs of space avalable... thats so dumb i could scream how cheap.

The eMac will work with 2GB of RAM just fine; buy the correct two 1GB modules, stick them in there, forget about it.

And to expand on what Jacke said, the reason the drive shows up as only 149.1GB (as it does on my eMac) is because of the vendor (1K = 1000) versus actual computer (1K = 1024) method of counting kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.

So, as far as the drive in my eMac is concerned, it is 160'041'885'696 Bytes in size. Which is, in fact, a bit larger than the 160'000'000'000 Bytes that hard drive vendors consider to be "160GB". Anyway, dividing by 1024 gets you:

Code:
160'041'885'696     Bytes
    156'290'904    KB
        152'627.8  MB
            149.1  GB

And as far as I know, there is no reason the eMac cannot support a 250GB drive, but keep in mind it would appear as 232.8GB.

[Matt2Dope]

does anyone know what brand of hard drives lacie uses?
i can buy the 250 gb fw hard drive and put it internaly and use the 40 gig in the lacie enclosure

[Jacke]

My new LaCie P3 drive is reported as wd16 (Western Digital) by the Apple System Profiler, but there's also a report on Accelerate Your Mac that has a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus.