7200 rpm's on an older imac?

[surfmaster]

ive got a 600mhz g3 imac that i sometimes do recording on and i was thinking of throwing a 160 gb 7200 rpm hard drive in there to replace the 40gb one. ive heard that it gets too hot to put one in an imac but have any of you guys had any problems or heard of anyone who has actually done it? im hoping that a faster hard drive will also decrease read time? am i right? just wondering.

 

[dgatwood]

Did you say G3 iMac? As in the big CRT beasts? In terms of heat, the hard drive is the least of your worries. If I were guessing, I'd expect he CRT to put out at least ten times more heat than the HD....

If you had said a G4 or G5 iMac where there are significant space constraints on the cooling, my answer would be to ask whether Apple ever shipped that model with a 7200 RPM Drive. But in a G3... I wouldn't worry about it.

That said, I doubt you'll see a huge improvement. Your audio performance is probably limited a lot more by the CPU horsepower than your hard drive.

 

[surfmaster]

yup an old g3 imac. it was one of the fastest they made, i got it for dirt cheap, and insofar has worked well for me as long as i dont use too many plugins. ive even done a song with 10 sequenced tracks and two audio tracks with plugins on them. as long as i lock down the tracks i dont want to change it works fine. i thought that locking down forced the computer to fetch a file from the hard drive rather than send it through the process of a plugin in the cpu. wouldent a faster hard drive help in that sense? being able to lock down even more tracks?

 

[macmoondoggie]

yup an old g3 imac. it was one of the fastest they made, i got it for dirt cheap, and insofar has worked well for me as long as i dont use too many plugins. ive even done a song with 10 sequenced tracks and two audio tracks with plugins on them. as long as i lock down the tracks i dont want to change it works fine. i thought that locking down forced the computer to fetch a file from the hard drive rather than send it through the process of a plugin in the cpu. wouldent a faster hard drive help in that sense? being able to lock down even more tracks?

I have an iMac DV 700mhz and it was the last crt iMac model. I upgraded it to a 120gb Seagate 7200 rpm. Just to clear up one point- all G5 iMac models have 7200rpm as standard.

 

[surfmaster]

cool. thanks for the info and help guys. now ive just got to get around to backing up files and physically replacing the drive.

 

[dgatwood]

I have an iMac DV 700mhz and it was the last crt iMac model. I upgraded it to a 120gb Seagate 7200 rpm. Just to clear up one point- all G5 iMac models have 7200rpm as standard.

Heh. Yeah. Guess there's your answer as far as the G5 iMacs go. I don't think I'd attempt a 10k or 15k in that tiny enclosure, though.