Installing a drive into an enclosure varies case by case.

Look for one with a cooling fan (especially for larger capacity drives) or a heat dissipating design for better drive longevity. are good places to buy enclosures online. To build your own external drive, find an enclosure that supports your disk drive’s size and interface, preferred connection(s), and design aesthetic We haven’t tested and rated these products, but they should give you an idea of what’s available. If you’re looking for an internal hard drive, here are a few products to look at. Speed If you’re happy with your Mac’s drive performance, stick with the same disk speed, but if you have a notebook and work with audio or video, consider getting a faster, 7200 rpm drive. 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. 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. 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. SuperDuper ( ), which easily and thoroughly duplicates your hard drive’s contents.

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 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. (The Apple Store won’t do upgrade installations, but it will replace damaged parts with equal replacements.) TechRestore, which provides several PowerBook and iBook hard-drive upgrade services ranging in price from $189 to $299. There are service providers that can do upgrades for you, such as 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.

Internal hdd for macbook pro