[Big Fat Octopus]

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience with upgrading the hard drive in an iMac G4?

My 1Ghz 17" iMac G4 has it's original 80GB drive but it is maxed out. I was hoping to upgrade it to a 200 or 250GB (8MB cache, 7200RPM) Western Digital or similar.

I have the instructions on how to do it BUT I cannot seem to find any reliable info on what maximum drive size, if any, the G4 iMac has?

Thanks in advance :-)

[Big Fat Octopus]

Hmmmm, well this is obviously not a popular subject :-)

I have since found references to people installing 200GB Hard Drive with a Formatted drive-size of 172.54 GB and working fine.

So I have taken the gamble without any hard evidence and gone and bought a 250GB drive! I will be installing it soon as I get some heat paste.

I still welcome any advice. However, I will post the end result here, be it failure or success, for anyone who is interested.

It's been nice talking to myself, cheers :-)

[PBG4 User]

If you have a problem with the drive size you may need to break it up into multiple partitions. At one point some Macs couldn't work with partitions greater 130GB or some number in that ballpark. If it doesn't work at first, try partitioning into 2 parts to get under this 130 (I think it was actually 137?) GB limit.

[P]

The limit is 128 gigabytes, or 137 of those silly mini-gigs that HD manufacturers advertise (ie 137 billion bytes). It is because the adressing structure in older IDE chips.

From what I can see, however, your iMac is not affected by this and should work. It does require at least 10.2 to be installed, however.

Avoid 8 MB cache versions if at all possible. They run much hotter than 2 MB versions, and the speed gain isn't that large. The iMac is very tight, and a hot harddrive will heat up the entire machine, degrading reliability and expected life span.

See this document for details

[Big Fat Octopus]

Thanks you guys.

I am running Tiger and I already bought a 250GB with 8MB Cache so I'm confident it'll work fine but concerned now that it will get too hot :-(

Hehehe, oh well, live and learn. My iMac never seems to get very hot anyway as it is only ever blowing out air not much warmer than the ambient room temperature. If it dies from melt down I'll be posting the end result here, presumably with a different computer.

[Big Fat Octopus]

UPDATE:

Well, installed the 250GB Hard Drie tonight and so far so good. Formatted to about 236GB and seems to be running fine with a fresh install of tiger.

I have been flogging the drive since I booted it and there does not seem to be any additional heat issues. Time will tell I suppose.

Very scary experience but not that difficult in the end.

[PBG4 User]

Good to hear.