Computerworld - Installing a second hard drive in one of Apple's new Power Macs is one of the easiest under-the-hood operations I've done, and outside of adding RAM (or buying a faster model), it's one of the simpler ways to get a speed boost from your computer.
We're talking here about the midlevel Power Mac G5 (see story), which sports dual 1.8-GHz G5 processors and comes with a 160GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive in stock configuration. But with 10,000-rpm drives now hitting the market, I opted to buy one to see what kind of speed increase I'd see in day-to-day use. Cost: $289 for a new Western Digital Raptor, a 74GB Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drive that offers twice the storage space of its high-speed predecessor.
Adding a hard drive is a breeze. When you open the Power Mac's side panel, you can easily find the empty hard-drive slot in the upper rear portion of the computer. The stock drive is located in the top bay; the second one goes just below it. All you have to do is take the four extra screws used to hold the drive in place (the spare screws are attached to the drive bay and have larger-than-normal heads), attach them to the new drive, push it into place, slide a lever down to keep it there and connect the power and SATA cables.
Restart the computer, use Apple's disk utility application to format the drive, and install your favorite Mac OS X operating system. I now have Mac OS X 10.3.3 installed on the new and old hard drives. For testing purposes, I looked at boot-up time, ran the Xbench benchmark application, checked the time needed to duplicate a folder with 51 items totaling 2.75GB of data, manipulated a 101MB TIFF image in Adobe Photoshop and added a transition to two film clips using iMovie.
Close-up of hard drive bay with lower slot empty
Not surprisingly, the new hard drive booted up the G5 faster, taking just 34 seconds to get from start-up chime to desktop. The older drive took 41 seconds, which is still about 9 seconds faster than when I booted up into Mac OS X 10.3.2. The operating system update released this week apparently sped up start-up times in general.
In both cases, auto log-in was turned on, with no start-up items to slow down the process.
Next, I ran Xbench. The old drive consistently achieved a benchmark score of 189 or 190. The new drive
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