14 DAY TRIAL // While the 2010 27-inch Apple iMac systems are some pretty cool computing systems, their storage capabilities aren't exactly superb, and that's exactly the issue OWC wants to tackle with their latest offering, namely a 3TB drive option. As Electronista reports, OWC's offering is a part of OWC's turnkey iMac upgrade program, and you're eligible to take advantage of the company's offerings if you're the owner of an 2010 Apple iMac 27" 3.2GHz Intel Core i3, Apple iMac 27" 3.6GHz Intel Core i5, Apple iMac 27" 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 or Apple iMac 27" 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7.
So, if you're the owner of one of the aforementioned systems and you're not afraid to void your system's warranty, you can turn to OtherWorldComputing (OWC) in order to add a Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000, a 7200rpm 3.5-inch standard SATA drive with 64MB onboard to the Apple system.
The hard drive upgrade to either a 2TB or 3TB drive can still leave room for up to two SSD drives to be installed in place of the optical drive, and OWC also offers to simply replace the stock hard drive with up to three SSDs of up to 480GB each without losing the optical drive.
The Hitachi hard drive has throughput of up to 200MB per second, while the OWC branded SSDs offer read/write speed of up to 270MB per second (this is not a major surprise, since SSDs are, after all, significantly faster than most HDDs out there).
Of course, such an upgrade doesn't really come cheap, the 3TB Hitachi upgrade option requires the addition of an eSATA external port (which normally sells for $169 by itself), and costs $469.
However, if you've already added an eSATA external port to your iMac, you can go directly for the drive itself, which will cost you around $260.