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I’ve never minded much about the noise my various computers generated, but recently, listening to the whine of my PC’s harddrive, something just “snapped” inside my head, and I declared war on noise - I just couldn’t stand it anymore.Guess everyone has it’s limits when it comes to this, and well, I guess after 15 years I reached mine.

The PC was quickly quitened down that same day by replacing the old Maxtor bootdisk with a Seagate Barracuda and a new CPU fan, but then another sound started bugging me: the old Quantum Fireball SE HD from my Girlfriend’s iMac DV made an ‘unbearable’ bearing noise when idle and loud knocking sounds when grinding. It also was too slow and too small, and okay, I just needed to finally rip open that iMac to poke around inside

At a computer fair PC Dumpdag I acquired a cheap Seagate Barracuda IV 20G harddrive. I’ve got good experiences with Seagates (of the past few years, before it was a different story IMHO), and especially the Barracuda’s are nice: reliable, reasonably fast and most of all: QUIET.

I didn’t need much space either, only for the applications and the OS since we store all our important data (like mp3’s and movies) on the noisy main fileserver in my attic, so 20GB was just fine.

To maximize return on investment I also set out for the newer version of Mac OS X called “Panther”, which delayed the surgery for a few days, but last friday I was ready for it: Girlfriend at work, cold beer in the fridge and nothing planned for the next day - excellent circumstances for some science.

After backing up some data, I googled around to find out how to open up the cute little thing. Fortunately, it proved to be very simple:

1. Rotate the mac and place it something soft with it’s screen facing down.
2. Remove the VGA extension slot plate and find the 4 screws that hold the bottom of the case together.
3. Remove the bottom of the case
4. Find the 6 screws holding the RF shield in place and remove them.
5. Remove the RF shield, now you should see the DVD/harddrive carrier.
6. Remove the memory and the flatcable from the harddrive carrier to the mainboard.
7. Remove the four screws holding the carrier in.
8. Remove the carrier from the case by sliding it up
9. Remove the harddrive from the carrier by removing the four little screws in the bottom.

This revealed the stock Quantum Fireball 8G harddrive, which reminded me of computing days of old. I noted that it unsurprisingly was jumpered to “Master” so I jumpered the new drive likewise.

I also noted that the DVD player is pretty custom-built for the iMac, it’s rather thing and the powersupply is integrated in the flat cable. Looks like you don’t want to break that as you’ll probably need to pay someone an unreasonable fee to get a replacement.

Anyway, “installation is the reverse of removal”, and I had the whole cute little thing back together in a minute or 10, put it back on his feet, hooked all cables up, powered it up, and…. the drive spun up, phew!

After a few seconds the mac presented me with an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark, so time to install a fresh OS.

This is also fairly easy, I put in a Mac OS boot CD, rebooted and held the ‘C’ to boot from CD, after a lot of grinding I was presented with the Mac OS installer. Fortunately, it saw the new disk just fine so it was time to partition and initialize it.

FWIW, I partitioned the drive in 4 partitions:

• 1G for a swap partition (this is known to speed up Mac OSX, and prevents your bootdisk from filling up at the same time)
• 6G for OSX (the iMac needs to boot from a partition within the first 8G of the harddrive!)
• 700M for OS9 (just needed to run classic, and to be able to access the system should the OSX partition go bad)
• 12G for “data”

After that I went out installing both OSX, 9 and apps, which took a while but was pretty straightforward.

The operation was a complete success: the new barracuda is much much MUCH quieter then the old drive, and also quite a bit faster too, mainly for being 7200rpm vs.5400rpm. Some people have expressed concerns about the extra heat generated by the 7200rpm drives, but there doesn’t seem to be any noticible difference between the Fireball and the Barracuda in my setup. These Fireballs aren’t called fireball for nothing, anyway.

Also, the new Mac OS X “Panther” seems to be much improved over the old one on many aspects. Maybe more on that later.

In any case, this is an easy way to shut up and speed up your iMac in one go: recommended!

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