Can I simply buy any SATA Hard Drive? New to Mac

mwatch said:

Can I buy any SATA hard drive and install it in my Dual 2.0 G5? I want to add a second hard drive for video editing work. It was easy in the PC world. Is it "plug and play" on my new Mac?

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Basically, Yes.

It has to be a 3.5" SATA drive of course. And although you can install one of the new SATA II drives, there is no benefit to doing so, the SATA controiller on the Mac is only SATA 150 (as are 99% of PC's as well)

You want to look for a drive with the full manufacturer's warranty of 3 (Maxtor, WD, Hitachi) or 5 (Seagate) years. Get it in writing. Beware of the cheapest drives that are "pulls", OEMs or recertified drives and have zero to one year warranty.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

Yes, hard drives are hard drives. Any SATA drive will work, and you'll use Disk Utility to format it.

CanadaRAM said:

And although you can install one of the new SATA II drives, there is no benefit to doing so, the SATA controiller on the Mac is only SATA 150 (as are 99% of PC's as well)

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I've heard horror stories about using NCQ enabled drives with pre NCQ SATA controllers for Windows and Linux.

Is NCQ supported? If so make sure the drive supports it too for best performance. Otherwise you might have to find a non-NCQ drive.

B

balamw said:

I've heard horror stories about using NCQ enabled drives with pre NCQ SATA controllers for Windows and Linux.

Is NCQ supported? If so make sure the drive supports it too for best performance. Otherwise you might have to find a non-NCQ drive.

B

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No, NCQ is not supported by any Mac, and not by 95% of PC's

CanadaRAM said:

No, NCQ is not supported by any Mac, and not by 95% of PC's

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I just purchased one of those monster 500GB SATA 2 drives from Hitachi for my upcoming Quad. I know one of the features is NCQ ... will this affect its performance on a Mac? Or is this nothing for me to have to worry about?

I have never heard of problems with backwards conmpatibility of NCQ capable drives on Macs -- if the controller doesn't send NCQ commands to the drive, it simply doesn't use those features.