Installing Second Hard Drive

[kjs862]

I want to install a second HD on my power mac g5. I looked at the specs at the apple website and the following were listing:

Type: Serial ATA
Width: 3.9 inches (102 mm)
Depth: 5.7 inches (147 mm)
Height: 1.0 inch

At the moment I'm doing some shopping on the web and when I bring up the specs of these HD's its showing the width to be 3.5 inches.

Would this make a difference? Also any suggestions on some good HD's would be appreciated.

-Ken

 

[ab2650]

I want to install a second HD on my power mac g5. I looked at the specs at the apple website and the following were listing:

Type: Serial ATA
Width: 3.9 inches (102 mm)
Depth: 5.7 inches (147 mm)
Height: 1.0 inch

At the moment I'm doing some shopping on the web and when I bring up the specs of these HD's its showing the width to be 3.5 inches.

Would this make a difference? Also any suggestions on some good HD's would be appreciated.

-Ken

3.5" hard drives refer to the platter size, not the physical exterior dimensions. I have a bevy of bare drives laying around my office and I can confirm the exterior dimension is about 4" by 5.75", what apple states; However they are all 3.5" drives. In fact, now-a-days you'll only really encounter two types. 3.5" (desktop drives) and 2.5" (laptop drives). There are 1.8" drives but those are used almost exclusively in portable music/media players, as well as 1" "micro" drives with a CF interface. The most important thing is drives are almost universally standard sized; I've only run into a few laptop drives that I couldn't get to fit due to their height difference. Never once with 3.5" drives.

The only thing you really have to worry about with drives on the G5 Power Mac is if it is SATA or IDE. Sorry I don't know the tech specs of the Power Mac, but I'd assume it's SATA (newer). (Edit: From your post, it looks like it's SATA (Serial ATA) as Apple suggested)

I personally like Seagate drives - I found some 400GB SATA drives at Frys.com for around $90.. If you're interested in spending more and getting a bigger drive, they have 500gb, 750gb and even 1tb (1000gb) SATA drives now.