Will this Hard drive work?

[Fredless]

I've got an eMac 800Mhz w/60gb hdd and superdrive, I bought it back in September 2002. Its been a great computer and hasn't hiccupped, but as the years have passed, it seems multitasking is a huge pain...nearly impossible. Even internet browsing sucks if there is a lot of images on the page.

I have 512mb of ram now, I plan on maxing it out to 1GB and I know I can't do anything else so I figured i'd get this Western Digital Raptor drive to speed up application load time and virtual memory access.

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/West.../sem/rpsm/oid/89821/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

thats the drive I'm looking at.

Also, where is the hard drive located in the emac? I've only opened up the door to get to the memory.

I'm running OSX 10.3.5 as well.

 

[Badger]

IMO You'll get a more noticible performance boost from a RAM upgrade than a hard disk swap. Since you are planning on doing the RAM upgrade anyway I'd do it first. Then if you are not satisfied you can look at the hard disk. Besides, accessing the hard drive on an eMac is a real challenge. This is a site for overclocking an early eMac but it has a link to a pdf take-apart guide that will show you how to access the eMac internals: http://www.studio-northwest.com/Hakz/index.html.

 

[technologist]

A Serial ATA hard drive like the WD above will not work with an eMac. You'll need a Ultra ATA drive (ATA-100? ATA-133?) to fit the connector in an eMac.

And of course, if browsing the internet is slow, your connection is most likely the problem. Page loads are quite snappy in Safari on much slower hardware than yours provided you have broadband.

 

[MoltenLava]

Swapping internal HD is not an easy job. Check out this site, and you'll get some idea. There is a link to service manual at the bottom, which explains what you need to do in order to get to the HD. It'll take at least an hour to disassemble, and you need to be somewhat handy and knowledgeable of electronics.

http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/eMac/eMac-upgrade.html

 

[Fredless]

A Serial ATA hard drive like the WD above will not work with an eMac. You'll need a Ultra ATA drive (ATA-100? ATA-133?) to fit the connector in an eMac.

What type of HDD's are in eMacs? Not the standard IDE? I figured since the SDRAM was interchangable with PC's, perhaps the HDD's would be. But since it can't handle that type of transfer speeds, no since in wasting the money on a 10k RPM HDD. I know going from a 5400rpm to 7200rpm HDD in my PC made a WORLD of difference in load times.

And of course, if browsing the internet is slow, your connection is most likely the problem. Page loads are quite snappy in Safari on much slower hardware than yours provided you have broadband.

I have road runner, and my downloads are lightening fast and the pages load as fast as my computer will handle them. My problem is, for example, on my camaro sites I post on, the emoticons are all animated on the left hand side of the text entry area, it seems after browsing for a few minutes, they animate slower and SLOWER. I can also type a lot faster than the words will appear on the screen. This site however doesn't do that to me because there isn't any active animation going on.

Multitasking is another PAIN. If I have MS Word up typing something for school, have iTunes going in the background, AIM up and running Safari...you might as well FORGET it. I don't know if thats memory related, or the bottle neck could obviously be at the 800MHz CPU.

Well since changing the HDD would be a complete pain and I have 40gb left on this hard drive, I'll just max out the memory and see if that helps and if not I'll have piece of mind knowing that this is the fastest my computer will go.