New HDD for my iMac

My iMac is 5 years old and was getting extremely slow. I don't think it was slow because it was getting cluttered by full caches and needing a tuneup because I regularly use Yasu to tune it up. I think it was getting slow because it is getting old and telling me it was about to fail catastrophically. My iMac is always on. Sometimes it is asleep, but a lot of the time it is on. I turned off the auto sleep because I sometimes use Vuse to download torrents and don't want it to go to sleep by itself.

In the last month or so it has been really slow. I took several days to convert a video from one format to another. It took the better part of a day to encrypt a DVD.

So I got fed up and bought a new HDD. I was surprised to see the price of new hard disks has doubled since the tsunami in Japan. All the more so since the new HDD was made in Thailand!

A black WD 1.0 TB drive retails here for $185. Thankfully, my girlfriend's son in law gets an employee discount which brought down the price to $130.

Here's the new drive:


The first thing I did after purchasing the new drive was to back it up using SuperDuper. This free software makes a bootable image. It took several hours to back the old drive up overnight. I already had a WD external 1.5 TB drive with a 1.0 TB partition for Timemachine and a 500 GB partition for SuperDuper backups. After backing up the drive, I tested it by booting it up while pressing the Option button. It booted fine.

I took the iMac apart and swapped the drive. I had taken it apart before so it didn't take long.

Here is the iMac with the new drive installed:



Here is the old Seagate 500GB drive:



After booting up the external SuperDuper backup, I initialized the new drive and called it "Terabyte HD". I then used SuperDuper again to copy the SuperDuper back to the new drive.



That took 4.5 hours this morning. After that completed, I restarted the iMac and now it is back to "like new" speediness. Plus, I have 540 GB free!