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- #WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC INSTALL#
- #WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC UPGRADE#
- #WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC PRO#
- #WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC SOFTWARE#
- #WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC MAC#
All you need is an enclosure.Īn enclosure is basically a shell to house an ATA/IDE or SATA 2.5- or 3.5-inch internal drive, providing power (bus power or a built-in supply) and connection interfaces. If you upgraded your Mac’s 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.
#WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC MAC#
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. Online retailers such as OWC provide Web guides that list storage options by Mac model.Ĭapacity Internal 3.5-inch hard drives have capacities of up to 2TB, while 2.5-inch drives provide up to 500GB.
#WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC PRO#
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 G3/G4) use a 3.5-inch ATA/IDE drive. MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac minis use a 2.5-inch SATA drive, while PowerBooks and iBooks use a 2.5-inch ATA/IDE drive-SATA and ATA interfaces are not interchangeable. Western Digital Scorpio Black 250GB Drive Compatibility Get a hard drive that matches the physical dimensions and connection interface of your Mac.
#WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC SOFTWARE#
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 Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner ( ) or Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper ( ), which easily and thoroughly duplicates your hard drive’s contents. You can use an external desktop hard drive, use a second Mac in FireWire target disk mode, or burn DVDs. Regardless of which Mac you have, if you decide to replace your current internal hard drive, you’ll need to copy all your current hard drive’s files onto another storage device before you do the switcheroo.
#WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC UPGRADE#
(The Apple Store won’t do upgrade installations, but it will replace damaged parts with equal replacements.) 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.
#WHAT KIND OF HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC INSTALL#
If you’re not sure which Mac model you have, see iFixit’s Mac identification system.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 one-it’s easy and takes only a few minutes.īut 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. If you click on a model name in the table, you’ll be sent to the iFixit guide for it if there’s no link, we don’t have a guide (yet). You’ll find out how difficult the upgrade is, what kind of drive that Mac uses, and a link to iFixit’s guide to replacing its drive. To find out how hard it’d be to upgrade your Mac, look it up in the guide below. On some Macs it’s easy to install a new hard drive on others, it isn’t. It’s a cost-effective fix: Drive prices have dropped recently, so you can get plenty of gigabytes for your bucks.īut before you crack the hood and start mucking about, pause for a moment to consider the project ahead of you. If you’re still happy with that old machine’s performance, there’s no need to get a whole new Mac just to get more storage room: In many cases, it makes way more sense just to upgrade the hard drive. If you’ve had your Mac for a while, chances are you’re running out of drive space. So we asked iFixit’s Kyle Wiens to quickly summarize the process of upgrading all of Apple’s recent Mac models and to provide links to iFixit’s instructions for each one. We thought you might find them just as useful. In the course of writing those stories, we found ‘s comprehensive collection of step-by-step instructions for upgrading hard drives invaluable. We’ve done a couple of our own hard-drive upgrade guides (for the Mac mini, the MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air). But it’s also one of the hardest to explain: each Mac model is different, and the upgrade instructions for one probably won’t apply to another. Editor’s Note: Upgrading the hard drive can be one of the best things you can do for your Mac.