Best Internal Hard Drive Pro Install An Additional
Best Internal Hard Drive Pro Upgrade Services Ranging

Best Internal Hard Drive Pro Install An Additional

If you have a Mac Pro, a Power Mac G5, or a Power Mac G4 or G3 with free drive bays, you can install an additional internal hard drive instead of upgrading your main oneits easy and takes only a few minutes.

But for the iMac, the Mac mini, or older Mac laptops, replacing the internal hard drive with a drive that has more capacity can be a difficult.

Best Internal Hard Drive Pro Upgrade Services Ranging

There are service providers that can do upgrades for you, such as TechRestore, which provides several PowerBook and iBook hard-drive upgrade services ranging in price from 189 to 299.

Regardless of which Mac you have, if you decide to replace your current internal hard drive, youll need to copy all your current hard drives files onto another storage device before you do the switcheroo.

You can use an external desktop hard drive, use a second Mac in FireWire target disk mode, or burn DVDs.

To ensure that nothing slips through the cracks (like your e-mail archive, bookmarks, fonts, and other important files), you might want to consider using drive-cloning software such as Bombich Softwares Carbon Copy Cloner ( ) or Shirt Pockets SuperDuper ( ), which easily and thoroughly duplicates your hard drives contents.

MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac minis use a 2.5-inch SATA drive, while PowerBooks and iBooks use a 2.5-inch ATAIDE drive-SATA and ATA interfaces are not interchangeable.

Likewise, recent Apple desktops (the Intel iMac, Mac Pro, iMac G5, and Power Mac G5) use a 3.5-inch SATA drive (the Mac Pro uses a SATA II drive), while older desktops (the iMac G3 and G4, and the Power Mac G3G4) use a 3.5-inch ATAIDE drive.

Online retailers such as OWC provide Web guides that list storage options by Mac model.

Later G4s, all G5s, and all Intel Macs can accommodate any drive capacity, but the iMac G3, Power Mac G3 (blue and white), and early Power Mac G4 have a limit of 128GB.

If youre looking for an internal hard drive, here are a few products to look at.

We havent tested and rated these products, but they should give you an idea of whats available.

If you upgraded your Macs internal drive, what are you going to do with your old drive Rather than stash it or trash it, you can easily (and inexpensively) convert it into an external hard drive.

An enclosure is basically a shell to house an ATAIDE or SATA 2.5- or 3.5-inch internal drive, providing power (bus power or a built-in supply) and connection interfaces.

It also provides a convenient way to initialize a new internal drive, allowing you to enclose your new internal drive as an external drive, clone your old drives contents to it, and then swap the drives around.

To build your own external drive, find an enclosure that supports your disk drives size and interface, preferred connection(s), and design aesthetic; OWC, NewEgg.com, and TigerDirect.com are good places to buy enclosures online.

Look for one with a cooling fan (especially for larger capacity drives) or a heat dissipating design for better drive longevity.

If youre installing an ATAIDE drive, make sure that the jumper setting is set to Master before installing (this doesnt apply to SATA drives).

Then mount the drive into the case, make any connections, close everything up, and youre good to go.

NewerTechs Voyager Q (100) or Voyager S2 (60) lets you insert an internal hard drive into its docking device and use it like an external drive, making swapping drives easy.

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Best Internal Hard Drive For Mac Pro