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Upgrading
Your Mac’s Hard Drive by Doug Noble In
the past, if you needed extra hard disk space, the logical
solution was to add one or more external SCSI drives. And
you can still do that with all except the most recent Macs,
which have abandoned SCSI (see Firewire at end of article). While compact Macs will only allow one
drive to be installed, 7500 and 7600 series and many "tower" models
like the 8X00/9X00 and G3/G4 models have space for multiple
hard drives inside, so expanding capacity is just a case
of adding a second internal SCSI drive. Today’s iMacs come with 10 gigabyte drives, one
thousand times the capacity of my first 10 megabyte hard
drive. But for a couple of hundred dollars, you can now buy
20 or 30 gigabyte IDE drives. (I’ve even seen Western
Digital giving way a free PC scanner with their drives!) IDE
is the standard used in PCs, and has been adopted by Apple
for most of its line as economies of scale have drive the
price down and the capacity up. Today’s drives are
also much faster than early drives. However,
it’s not possible to install today’s cheap IDE
drives in all Macs. Older Macs mostly use SCSI drives. Virtually
all non-Power Macs use SCSI (the exception is the Quadra/Performa
630 series). Most
pre-G3 Power Macs also use SCSI. G3, G4 and iMac models mostly
use IDE drives, though Apple still installs SCSI drives in
high end machines. As
SCSI drives are not built in the same volume as IDE, SCSI
drives are generally more expensive. For example, a 9 GB
SCSI drive costs about the same as a 20 GB IDE drive. SCSI
drives have a slightly different connector from IDE so it's
unlikely you could plug in the wrong one, just don’t
force it as you can bend the pins easily. The ubiquitous
SCSI standard has some newer variants, SCSI 2 and SCSI 3,
sometimes called Ultra SCSI. Most Macs use the standard SCSI
interface. The newer SCSI 2 drives are higher performance
but have a different interface connector which is only compatible
with top end G3s or other Macs equipped with a Ultra SCSI
card. The
first step in determining what type of drive to buy is figuring
out whether you need IDE or SCSI. Go to http://www.info.apple.com/applespec/applespec.taf
and check the Apple Spec database to find out what type of
drive the particular Mac model you want to upgrade needs. What
to buy? There are only a few hard drive manufacturers, and
you should be safe buying from Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum,
Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu or Western Digital. CompUSA sells
its own brand of drives; they are OEMed from Maxtor or Western
Digital. Generally, I recommend buying the biggest drive
you can afford, as no doubt you will outgrow it someday.
But if you have more modest needs, check closeouts advertised
on the Internet and Macworld. If all you need is a 1 GB drive
to replace your 500 MB drive, you may be able to find a bargain. Before
you upgrade a drive, figure out how you are going to transfer
existing files from the old drive to the new drive. Backup
to a Zip/Jazz/Syquest/Orb drive, burn a CDROM, backup to
an external drive or network drive on another Mac, or a tape
drive are all possibilities. Floppies are not the solution
any more, you would just need too many. If something does
go wrong, you still have the old drive available to reinstall
and retrieve files. So don’t format that old drive
till the new one is installed and tested! Installing a new hard drive is fairly simple, assuming you can figure out how to open the case! Once you open the case, you will find there is a power connector and a SCSI or IDE connector attached to the drive. Just pull the cables off the old drive. The drive may be mounted on a "sled" or a metal frame, unscrew the bracket and install on the new drive. Then,
plug in the power and SCSI/IDE cables and then boot your
Mac off the System CD or an external drive or Zip drive (don’t
close the case till you determine the drive works!) You should
also note the termination settings, which may be set by small
jumpers, check the drive manufacturer’s web site to
see if the drive needs to be configured. SCSI drives should
be set to SCSI ID 0 for internal use with termination ON,
IDE drives should be set to master. If these drives have
been used elsewhere, you should check out the settings. If
you are installing more than one SCSI drive in a machine,
the second drive should be unterminated and SCSI ID set to
3, 4, 5,6,or 7, otherwise the machine will have a SCSI conflict
and will not boot. While
most Mac vendors will sell you a drive preformatted for the
Mac, formatting a drive designed to be installed in PCs is
an issue. But it’s not too difficult. The latest Drive
Setup shipped with OS9 (and 8.5 I think) will format IDE
drives, even if the drive is formatted for PCs. Newer versions
of Drive Setup will also format non-Apple SCSI drives (early
version would not, FWB Hard Disk Tool Kit was a popular solution).
Try the free Apple setup utility first! With
one humungous hard drive, the minimum block size used by
each document becomes an issue. This is a complex subject
so I won’t delve into it here, but basically, it wastes
space on the drive. More to the point, finding stuff gets
harder when you have so much on one drive! You can use Drive
Setup to partition the hard drive into multiple volumes,
each of which appear as a separate drive on your desktop. You
might store your applications on one volume, and your documents
on another. You
now have the choice of Mac OS standard formatting or HFS
Plus, an extended format which makes more efficient use of
space and basically lets you store more files on the disk.
If you have an older Mac, or may want to boot the Mac off
pre OS8 disks, use the standard formatting as pre OS 8 systems
will not recognize the new format.
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