This happened to me and I don’t want it to happen to you. If you have an iMac you have a petty capable machine, but have you looked for where you can change your hard drive? There’s no hard drive door and there is not likely to be one added for some time. How will you survive if the hard drive does die on your iMac? I give you a solution after the break
iMacs are fun machines and the new ones are very well powered and provisioned to be the desktops that you wish them to be. There is one thing that might throw you into a tail spin and that is if your hard drive fails. This is not a once in a lifetime event with hard drives.
I seem to be hard on my hard drives. It seems that my desktop machines have a hard drive failure in about 18 months. The only hard drive that lasted longer than this is one 7200 rpm model that I paid full price for as a consumer drive. All my OEM drives seem to last about 18 months, but this is hard use. When I am in my office the computer is on at least 16 hours a day.
With the iMac replacing a hard drive is a matter of trundling it to the apple store to discover that it is no longer under warranty and will cost you. You could do the repair yourself, but that is fraught with pitfalls any one of which could render your machine useless, or you could do some preplanning.
My preplanning steps means that you need to get a couple of things right now. You need to get a couple of 2.5 inch Firewire 800 hard drive enclosures
. Yes, I said a couple. You also need some kind of drive cloning back up tool. I personally use Chronosync. For the enclosures you want a drive that matches what you have in your machine. These drives should also be 7200 rpm kind if you can afford it. the 7200 rpm will make the close a bit zippier when you use them as a bootable drive.
Now that you have the drives in the drive enclosures, attach one to the firewire 800 port. Wait for it to mount, or you may have to format the drive for Mac OSX. Then start you cloning software and clone your hard drive. Once finished put that drive somewhere safe. Next week clone the drive using the second drive. Take the previous drive away from your home or office. the week following that retrieve the off-site drive. Don’t forget to bring the on-site drive with you. Clone the drive with the retrieved drive. Keep doing this on a regular basis.
My information is very valuable to me, so I put my offsite drive in my safe deposit box. Yes, I do know the safe deposit box people quite well.
I guess that you could pay for the apple extended warranty, but that means some time before you could get you machine back, and even then you may not be able to recover the data without a lot of trouble and expense. Having Time machine back ups of my data, and the cloned drive makes it much easier to recover the computer after a repair, as well. This is one instance in which I feel that you might be justified in buying the apple warranty. All the other computers have user replaceable hard drives. The iMac does not.
[ad#ad-3]
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I just found your post because my iMac hard drive failed. I’ve been a Mac user since 1996 and I’ve never had a drive failure in my computers. Maybe I’ve been lucky or maybe I’ve started getting a lot harder on my drives. Either way, I’ve discovered the cold hard truth about the iMac’s hard drive…replacing it is going to be a pain. I have an appointment at the Genius Bar tomorrow and imagine that I will probably be told that I must pay to have my drive replaced. I never buy AppleCare and figure that I’ve saved enough over the years to buy myself another computer whenever I want. After learning what it takes to replace the drive inside these beautiful iMacs, I’m wishing that I had reconsidered my decision to forgo AppleCare. (I just read your post and realize that you came to the same realization.)
Anyways, just wanted to say thanks for this post, because I might just cancel my Genius Bar appointment and buy a new external drive and run it over FireWire 800.
{ 2 trackbacks }