Have a iMac which held/holds all my movies etc...it recently ceased to be able to turn on. It's not the power cord cause I tried using another one so my option seems to be to take it in to get fixed. Problem is that it's an old iMac, so old in fact that the op system can't be upgraded anymore and it's using 10.3 or something.... so fixing it will be basically fixing it so that I can have my movies on my network. So I'm thinking it's a better idea to get an external hard drive which has the sole purpose of being used to store/play movies. Usually I don't pay all that much attention to the dl/ul speed (or whatever) but will it make a difference if I'm using the drive to actually watch something off of it?

10/27/2010 12:14:50 PM

personally i like western digitals. just poke around http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=414&name=External-Hard-Drives and look at reviews, depending on your price point and storage size you want

though that doesn't really have much to do with getting the stuff off your old drive, if that's what you're interested in doing. you can get an enclosure, take the hard drive out of the imac, stick it in the enclosure and then plug the enclosure into a working computer to transfer all your files (to a new external drive i assume)

10/27/2010 12:32:19 PM

^would the transfer speed matter though? Cause if it's playing off of the external drive does it matter?

Also...I've never dealt or even really known about enclosures, but here's a question (probably dumb) but based on my limited research on them, couldn't I just take the hd out of my imac, put it in an enclosure and use that as my hard drive?

10/27/2010 1:16:15 PM

for the most part, you can run compressed 1080p content off your external without any trouble...your speed is limited by the USB interface (assuming that's what you're using), not the drive speed, and even a 4200rpm hard drive (in the case of portables) or an old 5400rpm desktop drive (the newer "green" drives are something like 5900rpm variable) will transfer data fast enough

yes, you can pretty much use any hard drive (new or from your computer or whatever) with any 2.5/3.5" (whichever's appropriate) enclosure that has the same interface (SATA, most likely, but if it's really old it might be IDE)

[Edited on October 27, 2010 at 1:30 PM. Reason : .]

10/27/2010 1:28:47 PM