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20" iMac G5, 250 GB or 500 GB hard drive?
- Thread starter waltchan
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waltchan said:
No.
The only question is do you need the extra storage. Don't worry about relative speeds.
Atlasland said:
I second that.. only question for the OP is: do you want external drives cluttering up desk space/floor space or no ?
Can a user upgrade the hard easily on the iMac?
if so and your not that computer literate and don't want to open the computer up and install a new hard drive when that fills ups get the 500 GB
if so and your not that computer literate and don't want to open the computer up and install a new hard drive when that fills ups get the 500 GB
Let's say I bought a 500 GB iMac. If there is 400 GB on storage right, how is the perfomance in terms of speed when comparing to a 250 GB with 150 GB in it? Isn't it much slower because there is too much stuff added into the computer. I know when I add more things into my PC computer, the speed slows down.
puckhead193 said:
The old G5 iMacs yes.. but the intel iMacs are a pain to open and upgrade .. "I think apple says if consumer opens intel iMac it voids the warranty" . <<IIRC
Hard Drive Question
I would recommend getting the 250 in the iMac and purchasing an external network drive when you run out of space. For the same amount of space, this is a cheaper option and it allows take your drive outside the home if need be.
Here's a good one: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10057 . If you wait to purchase this drive for maybe 6 months, you'll likely be able to get 500 gb for $300.
I would recommend getting the 250 in the iMac and purchasing an external network drive when you run out of space. For the same amount of space, this is a cheaper option and it allows take your drive outside the home if need be.
Here's a good one: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10057 . If you wait to purchase this drive for maybe 6 months, you'll likely be able to get 500 gb for $300.
NO no no no
No no no no...A computer's performance has NOTHING to do with the amount of data on its hard drive (unless the hard drive is, say, 99% full, leaving no room for virtual memory or swap files).
The PC slow down you experience is most likely a fragmented disk, and has NOTHING to do with the amount of files you have saved.
waltchan said:
No no no no...A computer's performance has NOTHING to do with the amount of data on its hard drive (unless the hard drive is, say, 99% full, leaving no room for virtual memory or swap files).
The PC slow down you experience is most likely a fragmented disk, and has NOTHING to do with the amount of files you have saved.
I would get the 500 Gbyte, but remember: thats 500 Gbytes that can potentially fail. Backup often!
i know read/write speed is generally higher due to increased data density/more platters, but i've never heard that.TMA said:
Homerjward is correct about larger drives generally being faster from the increased data density. Testing on Tomshardware.com has shown the transfer rates to be higher especially with large files. These larger drives usually have 16mb cache while the 250 and below usually have 8mb cache helping the larger drives even more performance wise. Look at the Seagate 7200.7 160gb versus a Seagate 7200.8 400GB in this test, it's about 30-40% faster in some areas. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10...00_gb_gets_ready_to_face_the_world/page4.htmlhomerjward said:
Personally I went with 250 as it was a 330 BTO difference.
An external 500gb can be bought for around that price giving a total of 750gb (well 700 after the space you lose once formated ) which represents better value for money.
An external 500gb can be bought for around that price giving a total of 750gb (well 700 after the space you lose once formated
) which represents better value for money.
no, he's just stating that, in the event of a disk failure, you lose more data from the 500gb drive than the 250gb one.waltchan said:
The size of Hard drive you lose from formatting is between 5% to 10% of box packaging.. example: i got a 160 GB rated from Manufacturer and now it's 154GB in size after formatting to HFS+
So 6 GB lost on average per 160 GB in size, So on a 750GB Hdd you'd lose about 30GB after formatting that drive so you'd end up @ 720GB drive ..
So 6 GB lost on average per 160 GB in size, So on a 750GB Hdd you'd lose about 30GB after formatting that drive so you'd end up @ 720GB drive ..
It's not to do with the formatting at all...
<Start Maths lesson>
Basically Hard drive manufacturers say that 1kilo byte is 1000 bytes, however the operating system says that 1kilo byte is 2^10 or 1024 bytes, this scales up for Megabytes and Gigabytes respectively. So basically a 160GB hard drive has 160 000 000 000 bytes on it, but when converted into operating system Gigabytes this is only 149GB, often the hard drive manufacturers are a little generous so you get a disk that is slightly bigger than this figure, but still less than 160GB.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte for more information.
<end Maths lesson>
<Start Maths lesson>
Basically Hard drive manufacturers say that 1kilo byte is 1000 bytes, however the operating system says that 1kilo byte is 2^10 or 1024 bytes, this scales up for Megabytes and Gigabytes respectively. So basically a 160GB hard drive has 160 000 000 000 bytes on it, but when converted into operating system Gigabytes this is only 149GB, often the hard drive manufacturers are a little generous so you get a disk that is slightly bigger than this figure, but still less than 160GB.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte for more information.
<end Maths lesson>
Eraserhead said:
What I was saying in my post #18 is You should always expect to lose between 5% and 10% of hard-drive space after formatting because some ppl believe that its the amount on the box is after formatting ..
i was trying to keep the terminology simple for n00bs etc ..
I have an iMac G5 /500GB
I have 171.85GB free.
Im glad i got it.
I have 2 320gbs for archiving/backing up
Im glad i have them
I have 171.85GB free.
Im glad i got it.
I have 2 320gbs for archiving/backing up
Im glad i have them
What?? Speed doesn't correspond to how big your HardDrive is?
I always turn down the brightness on my monitor to save on system RAM. Sometimes I unplug the mouse and keyboard whenever running processor-intensive applications.
I always turn down the brightness on my monitor to save on system RAM. Sometimes I unplug the mouse and keyboard whenever running processor-intensive applications.
As some people said already, many users assume that adding more files will slow down your computer, however, that happens only if you leave no room for virtual memory, so theoretically, it will take more time to slow down your computer performance (because you need to have more than 495Gb to leave no room for virtual memory). So buy the space that you need.
iphil said:What I was saying in my post #18 is You should always expect to lose between 5% and 10% of hard-drive space after formatting because some ppl believe that its the amount on the box is after formatting ..
i was trying to keep the terminology simple for n00bs etc ..
True, good point, it just really annoys me for some totally irrational reason
