[amagab]

I have the latest silver/black iMac 20" currently equipped with a 320Gb hard drive. I want to upgrade to at least 500Gb. What hard drive do you guys recommend? What manufacturer and model?

Thanks!

[mduell]

500GB isn't really much of an upgrade... I'd go with the 1TB Hitachi and remember if you don't have an Apple Authorized Service Provider install it, you may void your warranty.

[amagab]

Thanks! Do you know how much the Apple Store would charge to install it?

[Andrej]

I'm super old fashioned. 80 GB will do me well for another 5 years. LOL.

I keep a lot of my longer videos and giant software programs etc. as DVDs off the computer. It's a real pain to back them up when they take up however many hundreds of GB it is, especially when I don't access them all that frequently.


This is how I would like to see the hard drive scales:

Small: 250 GB.
Medium: 500 GB.
Large: 1 TB.


Oh, and those really aren't the actual values. All the wiseasses who design the hard drives rip you off. If you buy a 500 GB hard drive, then you will get 466 GB.

If you order 1 TB, you'll get 907 GB.

I'm not sure about you, but I want my 93 GB back!

[mduell]

Originally Posted by amagab 

Thanks! Do you know how much the Apple Store would charge to install it?

I don't think they will. Go to an independent Apple Authorized Service Provider and it's usually about $40.

Originally Posted by Andrej 

I keep a lot of my longer videos and giant software programs etc. as DVDs off the computer. It's a real pain to back them up when they take up however many hundreds of GB it is, especially when I don't access them all that frequently

It's a real pain to dig through a pile of DVDs to find the one I want.

Originally Posted by Andrej 

Oh, and those really aren't the actual values. All the wiseasses who design the hard drives rip you off. If you buy a 500 GB hard drive, then you will get 466 GB.

If you order 1 TB, you'll get 907 GB.

I'm not sure about you, but I want my 93 GB back!

The fault here lies with your operating system provider who tried to co-opt the SI prefixes k/M/G/T with their own definitions. When I buy a 1TB drive, I expect to get 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and I expect my OS to report it as 910GiB; if I bought a 1TiB drive I'd expect ~1,100,000,000,000 bytes, but no one chooses to sell 1TiB drives.

[CharlesS]

The thing about those MiB, GiB, TiB, prefixes that confuses me is: how are you supposed to pronounce them? How do you differentiate KiB and GiB from KB and GB in oral speech? And how the heck are you supposed to pronounce MiB and TiB, anyway? Migabyte? Tirabyte? Something else?

[richwig83]

(courtesy of google)

Mebibyte - MiB

Tebibyte - TiB


..... I've never heard either of those things before!!!

[mduell]

Replace the second syllable in the prefix with "bi" (as in binary).
More info on the IEC standard binary prefixes.