I have a G5, and I want to upgraded the primary hard drive. Will any SATA hard drive work, or do I need to get a MAC Hard Drive?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Do MAC need special hard drives?
- Thread starter spocksbrain
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
What's a MAC hard drive? You'll have to format probably anything you buy, but that takes a matter of seconds in disk utility.
Be sure to format the hard drive. Insert your OS X DVD and boot up the machine holding down the option key. Select Disk Utility from the drop down menu to format the drive (use HFS+ journaled).
A"Mac" hard drive is one that has firewire. I was at Best Buy and looking at HDs and they had some in the Apple section, and then had them where the PC stuff is. I looked at the box (the WD have red boxes for mac, whereas the PCs have a black or blue box) and the ones in the mac section had firewire. The HDs in the PC section say MAC/PC compatible. They just dont have FW.
Are you talking about external drives (I hope); the OP question sounds like they want an internal replacement drive.
seriously....you know what he means
you are mistaken
as long as the interface is correct, it will work with a format to hfs
FW has nothing to do with it being mac only. besides, we are talking with internal drives, not external............. even then, if we are talking about externals, it doesnt matter
Most external drives ship as FAT32 anyway so will work with Mac and PC out the box without reformatting.
true unless you want to use the drive as the boot drive for your mac which would require a reformat to hfs
Nothing special needed, whether external or internal. Needs to be formatted as HFS+ is you want to boot OS X from it.
Also, partition map GUID for Intel, APM for PPC. 10.4 or later required for GUID support for any use.