What do I look for when replacing my internal hard drive?

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Level 1

4 points

What do I look for when replacing my internal hard drive?

I have a mid-2007 iMac running Yosemite and in the past 3 months or so it became so slow it was barely functional, even Finder would terminally crash just after start-up. I backed everything up to an external hd and completely cleaned out my hard drive, reinstalling Yosemite. It's still very slow although I can do more basic tasks. I've been told it's probably my hard drive that needs replacing. If that's the case, what kind of hd do I need to look for? My current specs are:

iMac (20-inch, Mid 2007)

Processor 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory 3 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Startup Disk Macintosh HD

Graphics ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT 128 MB

In order to make my mac quicker than it was before all the trouble, do I look for a bigger Processor or more memory, or both?

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Mar 24, 2015 10:20 PM

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Answer 1

babowa

Level 9

78,103 points

Mar 24, 2015 10:34 PM in response to davewadam

Well, for one thing, you are running Yosemite on 3 GB of RAM which is barely enough to do web surfing and email - in general, 4 GB is considered to be the bare minimum, more is much better. According to this:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-2-duo-2.0-20-inch-alu minum-specs.html

yours can handle up to 6 GB.

Also, keep enough empty hard drive space at all times - 10 - 15 GB should be the minimum, more is much better for the OS to function properly.

And, with an older processor, make sure you don't have more apps open than you need, especially if they're GPU intensive.

Have you run the Apple hardware test? Use disk #2 of your install media and post back with results.

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