Upgrade the HDD?

I'm not sold on Macs quite yet (My Vista-equipped Inspiron e1505 is serving me well...then again I've been learning about the PC for about eleven years now and know how to fix any problems that arise). But the iMac looks freakin' awesome. And I might just have enough money to pony up for the highest-end configuration (though I'll have to pass on the mini-keyboard).

Except the RAM and HDD options are WAY overpriced. $700 to upgrade up to 4GB of memory is...um...3.5x the cost of buying the RAM elsewhere and installing yourself. So I'll get the base 1GB and buy the 4GB myself and install myself (I've upgraded every component of a PC but the processor, the mobo and the PSU so I'm okay with installing RAM).

My question is whether I can install my own hard drive and reinstall OS X onto it after I get the Mac. My point being that you can get a perfectly good Hitachi 1TB hard drive for $380 and the Apple upgrade from a 250GB HDD (which admittedly only costs $50-$70) is $550!

So how would I go about taking out the old HDD, putting in the new one and then installing OS X on it? Or do I hafta stick with whatever internal HDD comes with the Mac, which means paying a fortune if I want to get 1TB?

Thanks all!

The thing is that you don't even have to re-install it!!

Google up an app called Carbon Copy Cloner. You copy a bootable image of your disk to the new HDD... INSIDE OS X!!! Just plug in your new drive into an unused SATA port and Clone the image of the OS X install to the new disk. Then just remove the original HDD and plug the new one on its place and be done with it!

Heres the link:
Carbon Copy Cloner

I used it on the girlfriend's MacBook and it worked flawlessly.

There is plenty of information on it on the net.

Well, looks like it's easy to do a reinstall anyway and I don't have any free sata ports abywhere. But where do you put the drive? Video anyone? Thanx though.

Well opening it is realll hard for a start.

Apple also don't take kindly to it, so if you have to send it in for repairs, put the old drive back in first so they dont go 'you put in a new drive? YOU BROKE IT NO REPAIRS FOR YOU'

you will get install dvds with the mac so when u put the new hd in you can just install a freshcopy.
as for a guide or video on how to take apart the mac, wait. The thing hasnt been availble for 24 hours yet.

That's fine. I need to wait till Leopard comes out anyway.

buy an external fw800 enclosure and just keep in the standard 500gb hd it comes with