Installing WD VelociRaptor in an iMac

Awhile ago I wanted to give my iMac a performance bump but I’ve already done everything I could, or so I thought! The last remaining upgrade that was possible for my AL iMac was to give hard drive performance a bump.

I looked up the specs on the stock 320GB and obviously had lots of room for improvment. So I had to decide between performance and space. Although some of the newer large hard drives are pretty fast thanks in part to perpendicular storage and much higher density platters.

Western Digital came out with a replacement for the Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM drive which is the VelociRaptor 10K RPM drive. The VelociRaptor is faster, quiter, cooler and the drive itself is actually much much smaller. So I picked up the 150GB version since I couldn’t quite afford the 300GB version.

So once the drive showed up I took apart the iMac which was suprisingly easy. Made the drive swap which was a easy as pie and restored OS X from my backup. Overall process took about 15 minutes to swap the drive and 20 minutes to restore the backup.

The 320GB drive read speed on average was about 60Mb/s and the new VelociRaptor is over the 100Mb/s mark. I’d say this is a great speed bump. Anyway, the iMac boots almost twice as fast as well as applications. It’s quite amazing! I love it!

Anyway, I snapped a few pictures so here they are.

If you’re thinking about doing this and you have any questions, feel free to email me using my contact form or post a comment here. It was well worth the work but you might stop in at your local Apple store and have a pro do the job.