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. 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.
#Internal hard drive for macbook air 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. 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.