External hard drive?

[PaulG]

Hello,
To preface, I'm old, and not at all tech savvy. Have an early 2008 imac. It has 1GB memory. I've been told ( by my Grandson) that I can easily "update" this machine by installing an external hard drive.He recommended external power,and firewire connection. If I do this, what is required after plugging into my mac to set this up/ make it work? My real question is should I do this, and what will it give me? Also, how to pick the right make/model of drive. Thanks for taking the time.

Paul

 

[honestone]

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the board. Hope we can help you.

Before I go on. let me state that adding an external hard drive will not make, nor help, the machine to run faster. What that does is to give you more room to store information, and also room for a backup (asked below). A memory upgrade (also explained below) will definitely help your machine run faster.

In any event, first of all, what is the reason for the upgrade? Is the machine running slow, and/or is the amount of space left on your internal hard drive low?

Secondly, a wise upgrade would be to add more memory to your machine. It can take up to 4 gigabytes of memory (two 2 gigabyte memory "sticks"). The procedure is not that difficult. Here is a link that you need to start from:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1423#2

If you have a 20" iMac then click on where it says "iMac (20-inch, Early 2008)".

If you have a 24" iMac, then click on where it says "iMac (24-inch, Early 2008)".

When you click on either one, you will go to a diagram with instructions on installing the new memory.

Regarding what type of memory, and where to get it, Other World Computing (OWC) is an excellent source. Here is a link that shows the memory and prices for your iMac ($59.95 is a good price):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/6400DDR2S4MP/

Third, it is always good to have an external drive. Without knowing why you specifically need a hard drive, it's difficult to recommend a size. But, Seagate brands of drives are always reliable, and in my experience, work good with Macs. There is the decision, though, as to how you want to connect the drive to the iMac. Your iMac has 3 USB 2.0 ports on the machine itself, one Firewire 800 port, and one Firewire 400 port. The fastest connection would be to the Firewire 800 port, but a Firewire 800 External Drive can be somewhat expensive. Connecting through one of the USB 2.0 ports would be the least expensive, but the slowest.

No matter which drive you purchase, and no matter which connection you use, it will need to be "prepared" for usage with your iMac. You would use the program called "Disk Utility" to do this (it's already on your machine). There are few steps that you would need to go through using this program.

It's probably best, at this point, for you to answer the questions I stated above before proceeding any further. Two more questions: what OS (Operating System) are you using? And, are you doing any backups of your machine? Hopefully you are, because a backup would be invaluable in case something goes "wrong" with your iMac.

In the meantime, I'll see what Seagate drives are available. It could also be useful if you could tell us where you are located. If it's somewhere in the US, and in or near a "decent sized" city, you could possibly purchase the hard drive from a local Best Buy. They actually have one of the best price matching policies going.

 

[PaulG]

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the board. Hope we can help you.

Before I go on. let me state that adding an external hard drive will not make, nor help, the machine to run faster. What that does is to give you more room to store information, and also room for a backup (asked below). A memory upgrade (also explained below) will definitely help your machine run faster.

In any event, first of all, what is the reason for the upgrade? Is the machine running slow, and/or is the amount of space left on your internal hard drive low?

Secondly, a wise upgrade would be to add more memory to your machine. It can take up to 4 gigabytes of memory (two 2 gigabyte memory "sticks"). The procedure is not that difficult. Here is a link that you need to start from:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1423#2

If you have a 20" iMac then click on where it says "iMac (20-inch, Early 2008)".

If you have a 24" iMac, then click on where it says "iMac (24-inch, Early 2008)".

When you click on either one, you will go to a diagram with instructions on installing the new memory.

Regarding what type of memory, and where to get it, Other World Computing (OWC) is an excellent source. Here is a link that shows the memory and prices for your iMac ($59.95 is a good price):

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/6400DDR2S4MP/

Third, it is always good to have an external drive. Without knowing why you specifically need a hard drive, it's difficult to recommend a size. But, Seagate brands of drives are always reliable, and in my experience, work good with Macs. There is the decision, though, as to how you want to connect the drive to the iMac. Your iMac has 3 USB 2.0 ports on the machine itself, one Firewire 800 port, and one Firewire 400 port. The fastest connection would be to the Firewire 800 port, but a Firewire 800 External Drive can be somewhat expensive. Connecting through one of the USB 2.0 ports would be the least expensive, but the slowest.

No matter which drive you purchase, and no matter which connection you use, it will need to be "prepared" for usage with your iMac. You would use the program called "Disk Utility" to do this (it's already on your machine). There are few steps that you would need to go through using this program.

It's probably best, at this point, for you to answer the questions I stated above before proceeding any further. Two more questions: what OS (Operating System) are you using? And, are you doing any backups of your machine? Hopefully you are, because a backup would be invaluable in case something goes "wrong" with your iMac.

In the meantime, I'll see what Seagate drives are available. It could also be useful if you could tell us where you are located. If it's somewhere in the US, and in or near a "decent sized" city, you could possibly purchase the hard drive from a local Best Buy. They actually have one of the best price matching policies going.

honestone, thanks for the informative reply. I'm going to go with the memory upgrade and see how it works. Thanks again.

 

[honestone]

Sounds good, Paul. But, you might want to check how much space is left on the internal hard drive. To do that, after you boot up your machine, the desktop appears, and there will be an icon that represents your internal hard drive, along with a name underneath the icon. For example, on my Mac Mini, the name of the internal hard drive (it's actually a solid state drive) is entitled "Macintosh SSD HD".

In any event, just click on that icon once, then go to the File menu and select "Get Info". You will then see entries for:

Capacity (the size of your drive)
Available
Used

The one you want to look at is "Available". For example, here is what it says for the solid state drive inside my Mac Mini:

Capacity: 242.94 GB
Available: 152.77 GB
Used: 90,168,086,528 bytes (90.17 GB on disk)

So, as you can see, I still have quite a bit of space left on the drive.

I would strongly recommend that you purchase an external drive, so that you can use it for backups. The hard drive inside your iMac is eventually going to go bad, and thus you'll need a bootable backup in case that happens.

Believe it or not, one can replace the hard drive inside an iMac on their own. It is somewhat challenging, but certainly dooable. Let's leave that for another day!

 

[PaulG]

honestone,
Checked the hard drive as you suggested. Capacity is 249.72GB, Available is 207.5 GB. It would seem I still have plenty of memory left, so I think I'll pass for now on the 4GB upgrade. I am going to take your advice on the external drive though. Sounds like a good idea and I appreciate the heads up. Thanks again for all your help. You've turned what was a real problem for me into something I can understand and deal with easily.

 

[honestone]

That's good news, Paul. But, the available space of hard drive is disk space, not memory. A memory upgrade is definitely worth the investment, and your machine will run faster. And, as you stated, an external hard drive would be good also.

Here is a brief explanation about memory. Right now, the amount of memory you have (via the computer "stick" inside your iMac) is 1 gigabyte. Whenever a process tries to run on your machine, it tries to find some memory that could be available on the memory stick (or sticks). If there is not enough left, it will either not run (rather rare), or it will "grab" whatever virtual memory it needs from your hard disk. While virtual memory sounds like a "great" concept, and especially with all the space on your hard disk, the use of virtual memory is a slow, slow process.

When you start up your machine, the operating system (OS) is the first "guy" that will use memory from your memory stick. Once your desktop appears, if say you want to check your EMail, that EMail program will need memory to run. When it's done, and you quit the program, it will release memory, but some programs are not too efficient, and do not release the memory it used right away. If you next want to launch your browser (Safari, Firefox, or whatever), it might need to use all virtual memory, and it would most likely run rather slow.

So, to help with this, it is better to have more memory. In your case, you could quadruple the amount of memory you have from 1 gigabyte to 4 gigabytes, and that will definitely be a nice, inexpensive upgrade.