The 3tb hard drive upgrade has been covered a few times. However I would consider myself to have moderate PC and learning Mac skills and was not able to find all the answers I needed. I also ran into a lot of contradictory information on the subject. I hope my experience can help someone else.
I didnt want to loose my setup so I wanted to clone my drive with SuperDuper. I bought a 3TB Western Digital Green drive. I started looking for cases or external cables I could mount the drive in. I went through a couple from the local PC store that were supposed to work with MAC and 3TB limits. None of these would mount the disk on my Mac.
I called OWC and asked what they had. They have a USB universal drive adapter that works up to 3TB on Mac. They conversed with their techs, works with my drive, my model iMac, all 100% confirmed to work together. The cable arrived but again no luck, not one mac but 6 macs could not see the drive. Hmmm ..bad drive nope, works with Win 7. Spoke with support, they were baffled. They issued an RMA and paid for return shipping.
At this point I am getting really frustrated. Ive burnt up tons of hours on the Internet and talking to support and sales people on the phone. I really did not want to rip my iMac apart unless I knew I was 100% ready to go.
I decided to go ahead and install the drive in the iMac. My wife and I spent about 40 minutes dismantling and installing the 3TB drive in our iMac. I ran into a couple issues with the install. I watched some youtube videos but to warn you there were differences, like the drive mounting bracket, wires to the monitor were not all the same, iSight camera was slightly different. All very minor differences and nothing was a real hindrance. There was a lot of talk about the temp sensor. Some plug directly into the drive and others are just a sensor taped to the drive. Mine was tapped and very easy to move. While dismantled I took the time to clean out the dust bunnies.
After re-assembly I fired up the iMac and popped in the OS disk. After quite a long time the CD loaded and I was able to setup the OS. The drive was completely recognized for the proper capacity.
So now this was just an experiment and my ultimate goal was to clone the old OS to the new 3TB drive now inside my iMac. I happened to have a dual bay USB 2.0 external sata drive enclosure from Rosewill. I was not sure if it would work with a single drive but I popped my old iMac drive in and it worked like a champ. I did a little googling to find out the process for booting from a USB drive. Following this procedure it booted from the external perfectly. The internal 3TB was in disk manager. I used SuperDuper and cloned the drive. Restarted and everything worked great from the internal 3TB. Just like I never changed the drive out in the first place.
During my exhaustive search I encountered a great deal of conflicting information. I hope my experience can help some other people. My biggest mistake was being afraid to crack open the Mac before I knew if the drive would work. I should have just cracked it open, checked the heat sensor type and swapped the drive. Trying to deal with external drive solutions for the 3TB disk was a waste of time.
Here are some useful links and information I found helpful and some of the parts I used.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...re=western_digital_3tb-_-22-136-764-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m_re=rosewill_dual_bay-_-17-182-144-_-Product
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_3tb_review_wd30ezrsdtl
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1948
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/U2NV2SPATA/
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zoUO_umd5g
I didnt want to loose my setup so I wanted to clone my drive with SuperDuper. I bought a 3TB Western Digital Green drive. I started looking for cases or external cables I could mount the drive in. I went through a couple from the local PC store that were supposed to work with MAC and 3TB limits. None of these would mount the disk on my Mac.
I called OWC and asked what they had. They have a USB universal drive adapter that works up to 3TB on Mac. They conversed with their techs, works with my drive, my model iMac, all 100% confirmed to work together. The cable arrived but again no luck, not one mac but 6 macs could not see the drive. Hmmm ..bad drive nope, works with Win 7. Spoke with support, they were baffled. They issued an RMA and paid for return shipping.
At this point I am getting really frustrated. Ive burnt up tons of hours on the Internet and talking to support and sales people on the phone. I really did not want to rip my iMac apart unless I knew I was 100% ready to go.
I decided to go ahead and install the drive in the iMac. My wife and I spent about 40 minutes dismantling and installing the 3TB drive in our iMac. I ran into a couple issues with the install. I watched some youtube videos but to warn you there were differences, like the drive mounting bracket, wires to the monitor were not all the same, iSight camera was slightly different. All very minor differences and nothing was a real hindrance. There was a lot of talk about the temp sensor. Some plug directly into the drive and others are just a sensor taped to the drive. Mine was tapped and very easy to move. While dismantled I took the time to clean out the dust bunnies.
After re-assembly I fired up the iMac and popped in the OS disk. After quite a long time the CD loaded and I was able to setup the OS. The drive was completely recognized for the proper capacity.
So now this was just an experiment and my ultimate goal was to clone the old OS to the new 3TB drive now inside my iMac. I happened to have a dual bay USB 2.0 external sata drive enclosure from Rosewill. I was not sure if it would work with a single drive but I popped my old iMac drive in and it worked like a champ. I did a little googling to find out the process for booting from a USB drive. Following this procedure it booted from the external perfectly. The internal 3TB was in disk manager. I used SuperDuper and cloned the drive. Restarted and everything worked great from the internal 3TB. Just like I never changed the drive out in the first place.
During my exhaustive search I encountered a great deal of conflicting information. I hope my experience can help some other people. My biggest mistake was being afraid to crack open the Mac before I knew if the drive would work. I should have just cracked it open, checked the heat sensor type and swapped the drive. Trying to deal with external drive solutions for the 3TB disk was a waste of time.
Here are some useful links and information I found helpful and some of the parts I used.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...re=western_digital_3tb-_-22-136-764-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m_re=rosewill_dual_bay-_-17-182-144-_-Product
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_3tb_review_wd30ezrsdtl
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1948
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/U2NV2SPATA/
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zoUO_umd5g