Yep only had the Mac for a little over a week and already preformed the first upgrade on it. As an part time Anime Geek I use Bittorrent quite a bit to get fansubs and at 150-300 Mb per file they quickly add up to severl gigs of data. Right now most of my collection sits on an Maxtor 1Tb external Onetouch III Turbo drive. Now this drive is equiped with Firewire and while it was formatted NTFS for my windoze box the Mac should be able to see it and read from it. Operative word in that last sentence is should, turns out that the Onetouch III drives don’t get along with OS X 10.5 all that well and whenever I hook it up I get a cant read this drive error.

So now I while I could reformat the drive and hopes it works that would destroy my files and it would take some time to get everything back. What I need is more storage space on the Mac, as I only bought the base model with a 320GB drive, so I can transfer the files over the network after I hook the Maxtor drive back up to the old computer. So I pick up a Seagate 750Gb drive at work Friday. Now Apple sells this as a $250 upgrade or $399 as a bare drive. I was able to pick it up at work after couple of coupons for about $120. The install went pretty quick and easy.

So there is the Mac sitting on my desk. I need to mod the desk so the tower doesn’t need to sit sideways. (Man look at those finger prints need to clean that up)

Now that shes open we can remove the second drive rack bracket.

Bracket removed have not had to use a tool yet.

This is the bracket that holds the drive not much to it. The thumb screws have a little rubber gasket that helps keep vibrations from transferring to the case and making noise.

The bracket and the drive.

The bracket attached to the drive. The screwdriver is not really necessary to install the bracket but it did make it go a lot quicker. Small thumb screws and my big fingers do not go well together.

The drive installed in the Mac (Ok, really its the same picture as before but it’s not you would see a difference anyway)

All told the install took less then five minutes including taking the pics, that a good 10-15 minutes faster then I have ever installed a dive in any of my other computers. So the plan is tomorrow hook the windoze box back up, attach the Maxtor drive and hope everything works. After that get all the Anime transfered over to the new drive then nuke that Maxtor and see if I can get it working with the Mac if not the sucker is going up on eBay. If it works the plan is to use it for the Time machine backups. Next upgrade more RAM.

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