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Fabio7371 · Aug 23, 2006, 01:27 AM

My sister loves her little iMac. I am a PC guy..boooo! I know, but I want to help her so.... She is getting a message that she is out of disk space. She moved some files out of her hard drive to no avail and the Mac shop wants $300 to upgrade the hard drive.

Do you guys know... a) does the iMac have a firewire port that will accept an external hard drive? b) Can I just buy an 250GB external hard drive that will not break the bank? c) any recommendations for an value priced external hard drive. d) any OS limitations?

I appreciate any input you gentleman & gentleladies care to share.

Fabio

JKT · Aug 23, 2006, 02:31 AM

Yup, it'll have a Firewire port to which you can hook up an external drive. In terms of limitations, the internal drive can't be larger than 120GB, but I don't know if that applies to an external. I'd assume not, but probably worth finding out from someone who has experience beforehand. However, can you tell us which version of MacOS your sister is using?

I would recommend FireWire Depot or OtherWorldComputing.com for obtaining pre-built solutions. They also sell enclosure kits to build your own. Personally, I would recommend getting a drive that offers both FW400 and USB2.0 connectivity just in case.

Note though, opening the iMac and replacing the internal hard drive is actually not that hard to do yourself ($300 - seems a bit steep, but the process can be a little time-consuming I guess). This site has the Apple Manual for a number of Macs, including your sister's iMac. Regardless of that, an external is a nice thing to have anyway - you can install the OS on it to have a back up boot drive, and more importantly, you have a back up, full stop!

Fabio7371 · Aug 24, 2006, 12:48 AM

She has the Mac OS 9.1 version and she did look and found two Firewire ports. I am going to get her a 160GB or so but I did not see any documentation limiting the size. I am 95% sure that a 160GB would work.

Thank you for your quick response.

Fabio

chefpastry · Aug 24, 2006, 06:00 AM

The 160GB drive will work, but it will not be able to use more than 137GB of the drive's capacity. This model does not have LBA48 support.

Fabio7371 · Aug 24, 2006, 06:25 PM

Chef - thanks for the heads-up. Now I will not go crazy trying to figure out where the rest of memory went. 137GB compared with what she has now will be a huge improvement. I think she has like 20GB and she is trying to save 500MB photos all over the place.

Thanks again - Fabio

chefpastry · Aug 24, 2006, 06:27 PM

My pleasure.

JKT · Aug 24, 2006, 07:11 PM

I don't know if this will work or not, but what happens if you partition the hard drive to e.g 120GB + whatever is left over - will the iMac see the two partitions in their entirety? If that does work, it may be one way of using the whole disk... but you'd have to find a way to partition it first which you obviously wouldn't be able to do from the iMac!

steve626 · Aug 25, 2006, 12:08 AM

Originally Posted by chefpastry

The 160GB drive will work, but it will not be able to use more than 137GB of the drive's capacity. This model does not have LBA48 support.

I have this same iMac model, 2001 indigo G3, and it came with 20 Gig internal drive. I connected two firewire drives to it, each has 250 Gig of space, each purchased from Fry's for $125 when they were on special. I can see all 250 Gig of each drive when connected to the iMac. I did this to store all the iTunes and iPhoto files on one external drive and the other is used for backups of everything. My computer is dual boot and has OS9.2 and OS10.2.8.

chefpastry · Aug 25, 2006, 09:41 AM

I was talking about drives connected to the internal IDE controller, not external Firewire drives.

chefpastry · Aug 25, 2006, 09:42 AM

Originally Posted by JKT

I don't know if this will work or not, but what happens if you partition the hard drive to e.g 120GB + whatever is left over - will the iMac see the two partitions in their entirety? If that does work, it may be one way of using the whole disk... but you'd have to find a way to partition it first which you obviously wouldn't be able to do from the iMac!

Nope. As suggested above, external will work fine. Internal, you'll only see 137GB.

Fabio7371 · Aug 25, 2006, 12:01 PM

Originally Posted by chefpastry

I was talking about drives connected to the internal IDE controller, not external Firewire drives.

Oh I am sorry. I was not clear. In order to upgrade the internal drive I would have to do it and it would be easier for me, due to the distance, to just get her an external drive.

I am glad I asked the question because in the future if she wants to upgrade the internal we know it does not make sense to go over 137GB.

Fabio