iMac HD & Airport Upgrade (1st-gen Core Duo)

[ColinEC]

Hey,

I've always wanted to open up my first-generation 20" Intel iMac, but was too scared to do it.

Today I finally opened it up to look around (and clean up the dust ). Turned out it was really easy to open the iMac and put it back together!

So what I'd like to do is upgrade the 250GB HD to either a 500GB or 1TB HD.

I'd also like to upgrade the airport card from 802.11g to 802.11n.



What hard drives are best to use with my iMac?

From what I've read, any drive thats SATA-150 w/8MB cache at 7200RPM should work fine. Is this true?

As for the airport card, where can I buy an 802-11n-compatible card that will work with my iMac?

Thanks.

 

[CWallace]

The Mac Pro 802.11n Airport Card may work. It is the one folks use to upgrade the Core Duo / Core Solo MacBooks that shipped with 802.11a/b/g only. A Google search will likely confirm which card to use.

 

[smirk]

So what I'd like to do is upgrade the 250GB HD to either a 500GB or 1TB HD. I'd also like to upgrade the airport card from 802.11g to 802.11n.

What hard drives are best to use with my iMac? From what I've read, any drive thats SATA-150 w/8MB cache at 7200RPM should work fine. Is this true?

That model iMac has a SATA-150 controller, but any SATA drive -- 150 or 300 -- will work great with it. SATA-300 drives are backward compatible, so no worries there. I'm about to replace my drive with a Western Digital WD6400AAKS, which is SATA-300 with a 16 MB buffer. I'm taking performance benchmarks before and after the swap and will share them if you'd like.