Need to do an hard drive upgrade....please help.

[apulk]

I have a 3 year iMac G5(no iSight) running Tiger. I have the 160gb drive and have about 11gb available. This is our shared computer (I have a MacBook too) so it stores our iPhoto library (~24,000+ pictures), our iTunes library and our kids and wife's email. I have an external drive that I manually backup to and just recently got a 500gb external. I love the Time Machine on Leopard on my Macbook and would really like to not have to worry about the backups. So my thought is to upgrade my hard drive and OS. I am an IS Director (>20 years experience) but always in a Windows shop. I've built my own Win based pcs in the past and have no concerns ripping open boxes for my friends and neighbors. But -- something about opening up that iMac makes me nervous. Have only added memory. Now for my question(s).

Is this a big job? It should be easy right?
If I'm going to upgrade both -- what order should I do it? I'm thinking upgrading to Leopard, connect the next external drive, let Time Machine do it's thing then putting in the new drive, install Leopard again and then restore from the Time Machine backup. Does that make sense or is there a better way.
Considering a Western Digital Caviar SE16 400GB Internal SATA Hard Drive -- about $80 on MacMall. Sound like a good pick? Or -- Circuit City has a Seagate 500gb for $100 that I could pick up in 20 mins and do it this weekend.


Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks much. Andy

 

[Bad Paper]

not sure that that is the intended usage of Time Machine. I don't use Time Machine, so I'm not sure what's right and what's not. I would be nervous that once I installed the new disk, time machine might try to hose what I've already backed up or something. If I don't understand it, I don't want to give it a chance to burn me.

If I were you, I would just copy the whole damn disk to your external drive, then install the new disk, install Leopard, then copy what you need from your external. It's a little more time/labor intensive, but how would you feel about being burned for forgetting to backup something that you didn't realize was important?

 

[CanadaRAM]

Pick up a SATA/Firewire external enclosure (such as a MacAlly or Vantech). Put your new drive in the enclosure. Use CarbonCopyCloner to make a bootable clone of your existing drive to the external. Open the back of the iMac and swap drives. Done. And you have an external 160 GB for backups.

(BTW those drive prices are not the best ones out there... Look for the Western Digital 640 GB at about $75 - very nice drive)

 

[apulk]

Pick up a SATA/Firewire external enclosure (such as a MacAlly or Vantech). Put your new drive in the enclosure. Use CarbonCopyCloner to make a bootable clone of your existing drive to the external. Open the back of the iMac and swap drives. Done. And you have an external 160 GB for backups.

(BTW those drive prices are not the best ones out there... Look for the Western Digital 640 GB at about $75 - very nice drive)

Must say -- that is a very good suggestion -- never thought about it. I'm a little impatient and when I decide I want to do something -- I usually want to do it now so I had the bug to do the upgrade this weekend -- that's why I was willing to pay the extra money for being able to pickup the drive on my way home from work. But....then I have a 160gb sitting around doing nothing. If I had to order and wait on the external enclosure then I might as well order the drive online and save some $$$. Thanks.