When Ordering iMac: More internal Hard drive space or buy an external?

[Hatchet]

I am tempted to order the stock 24" iMac 2.8GHZ and get OWC ram upgrade and a external harddrive to save money.

Is that a better option than getting the larger internal hard drive? What are the pros and cons?

 

[imac123]

my opinion:

for "normal" everyday use files, I prefer to keep these on my internal just for ease of use (I would get annoyed if i had to hook up my external all the time). for "stored" files like video editing files or backups, i use an external b/c I only have to hook it up once in a while.

also, ppl opt to upgrade their internal HD space b/c of the general trend that you'll probably end up needing/wanting more than you originally got.

if you don't mind always hooking up the external... thats fine. but it would annoy me if it was a daily task =/ but im lazy =P

I opted for a 500 GB HD and use my external only for time machine backup

 

[Hatchet]

my opinion:

for "normal" everyday use files, I prefer to keep these on my internal just for ease of use (I would get annoyed if i had to hook up my external all the time). for "stored" files like video editing files or backups, i use an external b/c I only have to hook it up once in a while.

also, ppl opt to upgrade their internal HD space b/c of the general trend that you'll probably end up needing/wanting more than you originally got.

if you don't mind always hooking up the external... thats fine. but it would annoy me if it was a daily task =/ but im lazy =P

I opted for a 500 GB HD and use my external only for time machine backup

Can you have your external hooked up all the time? Or is that not good for the external?

 

[gehrbox]

Can you have your external hooked up all the time? Or is that not good for the external?

I opted to upgrade my HDD to 500GB AND bought 2 external drives. One 500GB MyBook firewire for storing movies and one 500GB Mybook USB for Time machine. You can never have too much HDD space!

I leave them on all the time and not had any issues.

 

[Jon.Stewart87]

I opted to upgrade my HDD to 500GB AND bought 2 external drives. One 500GB MyBook firewire for storing movies and one 500GB Mybook USB for Time machine. You can never have too much HDD space!

I leave them on all the time and not had any issues.

ballin!

 

[thecrackerjack]

Well I just ordered my 2.8 and opted for the 500GB drive. My reasoning... well I can fill a 320gb drive in a couple of days with footage and playtime materials so 320 seems a bit small for what could hold your world of personal pictures/photos and videos.

How ever I didn't feel like spending any more money on a larger drive on account of the larger drives still being relatively 'new' technology to the consumer market. I didn't want 1Tb of data to blow up one day from to long of constant high temperatures.

On the upside of a stock computer it should come from the u.s. and not China. I ordered my 2.8 with the 512mb video and 500gb hdd and it has to be built and shipped from China to Canada.

 

[ChrisWickensCom]

I'm ordering my first iMac in the next couple months, but my situation is a littler different.

I will be getting the smallest internal harddrive I can and for every day use I will be storing my MP3's and any movies I currently want to watch on that and when I am done with the movies they will get transferred to one of my 5 external USB HDD's.

Aside from that, I will be using 1-2 firewire HDD's daisychained through my protools 003 unit for strictly storing/recording audio data from protools.

These days with USB and FireWire speeds, storing anything other than HD video on them is perfectly fine and you shouldnt have any problems running audio/video directly from an external HDD.