[davelong9050]

As a prosumer, I have been "on the fence" between MacPro and iMac for the last 6 months. Now that the iMac Extreme is available, it is hard to justify the MacPro. However the hard drive on the iMac has 8 GB of cache and I am considering replacing it with a drive that offers 16MB of cache. Hard drive upgrades (after purchase) are not available by any apple store, etc. You open it, NO WARRANTY, period. So that said... decision time. Do you A) Buy the warranty and just deal with the drive? or B) Not buy the warranty, open it up and replace the drive, deal with any consequences down the road? Opinions?

[mduell]

The difference between an 8MB cache and 16MB cache drive is really quite small.

If you still want to do it, CompUSA will do a hard drive swap for $30, and they're Apple authorized so your warranty is preserved.

[HazMacFan]

You could use faster drives externally with Firewire 800 and not worry about voiding your warranty.

[mduell]

The additional latency of FW800 would probably negate the benefits of 16MB cache over 8MB, and the cost is quite high (about $80 for a decent enclosure).