12-14-2009, 01:50 PM

Hi

My friend has the above model, and is considering to give it to two young girls for a "play machine", and the playing will be mostly with GarageBand. I will help him upgrade RAM, but I've also read GB is HD-intensive, and in another forum someone recommends upgrading the HD on exactly the same machine to a "7200 RPM" for GB.

What I don't understand is that Apple specs say the HD is already 7200 RPM. It's the 1 GHz model. Is the RPM speed the only indicator of speed on a HD? I don't know much about HD's so let's just put the question as simple as possible: Are there available HD's for this iMac model, that have noticeably higher speeds? Is it recommended to upgrade for HD-recording/GarageBand? Are they nicely priced? Should we instead leave the HD as it is, and maybe buy an external for later upgrades? Capacity is of no concern so far.

12-14-2009, 02:53 PM

Personally if the current hard drive is working fine...I wouldn't worry about it.

If you're going to run into any problems with this computer it's going to be CPU or graphics related (older machine)...not the hard drive.

HTH,

- Nick

12-14-2009, 03:27 PM

I agree with Nick, if this is just going to be given to 2 little girls to play around with I wouldn't waste any money on upgrades. They wont be doing any intense amounts of rendering video footage on the computer or doing extensive graphic design/editing. Keep every thing the same and just continually run onyx/iceclean every 2 weeks or so and also check for updates every week and you will be good to go in my opinion.