PC storage for OS X & my Apple Macintosh

There was a day when getting another hard drive for your Macintosh meant spending a lot of money and effort.  Those days are gone for sure if you have a tower.  A couple of days ago, I got that ominous warning that my startup disk was almost full on my dual G5 that I use at the beach.

I really didn't feel like crawling through the hard drive and my thousands of photos to give myself another month or so of storage, so I convinced my wife to join me for a trip to Staples in Morehead City, NC. 

As you might expect there is no Apple gear on display in Staples.  Since I had already added a standard 160 gig SATA II drive to this G5 last Oct., I knew that all the cables were standard.  I also guessed that in spite of not a single mention of the Mac on the Maxtor 300 gig hard drive box, the drive would likely work in my Mac.

It wasn't a huge gamble since the drive only cost $107 plus taxes and my Dell PC had one of its two SATA drives dead.

Since I wanted to replace drive A or the top drive on the dual G5, it took a little work to get it out.  First I tried bringing the drive straight out, and there just was not enough clearance.  Then it occurred to me that there was no way Apple would engineer a drive that would not come out easily.  I took drive B or the lower drive out first, and then figured out that the top drive had a channel that let it drop down as long as drive B wasn't in place.

Then drive A came out easily.  Much to my surprise drive A was also a Maxtor. It's hard to believe that I thought the 80 gig drive was large when I bought the system in December 2004.  I took the old 160 gig drive which had been in slot B and made it the top drive.  Then I removed the little plastic buttons from the original 80 gig Maxtor and put them on the 300 gig drive and inserted it into the drive cage.  I then connected the cables, flipped the little gray plastic buttons that hold the drives in place, closed the case, and put the dual G5 back in place and booted it up.

The Mac immediately noticed that the new drive needed formatting and launched Disk tools.  I formatted the drive and inserted my Tiger DVD.  The system rebooted again and in 45 minutes from the time I had opened the case, OS X was asking me if I wanted to migrate data from another partition.  I said "yes" and in a few minutes the screen told me that it would take 9 hours plus to migrate.  I knew that was way off as an estimated time so I came back in a little less than two hours, and it was done.  I finished the setup, rebooted and started Software Update, remembering to agree to everything before I left for dinner.

When we got back from dinner, I had my familiar desktop with 156 gigs of extra space.  It is pretty nice to have some of those standard PC parts work in your Mac when you live in the beautiful boondocks like I do.

Comments

[Barbarossa]

I have a Quad G5 and have collected a great deal of music and audio books to iTunes. Perhaps you found the 160 GB disk a large upgrade, but I recently had to replace my dual 500 GB disks with those massive 750 GB HDs from Seagate. (The cost has come down a great deal lately.) I actually have three: One internal, a second internal back-up, and a third external FW 800 back-up back-up. (Yes, I did once have a very bad experience with a hard drive.) I use 'SuperDuper!' to back-up on a regular basis.

[Rusty]

Nice post, the only thing I would add?
1) if you have an Intel Mac, remember to partition the new HD, after formatting, to the new partition scheme: GUID Partition Table (GPT), if you want to boot from it.

2) I find it easier to use the free Carbon Copy Cloner S/W that makes an exact clone of your HD in about 2 hrs.

I have 7 FW external drives on the Mac Book Pro, and boot from one of them, a 400GB Seagate....

[rahrens]

I would only do one thing different than you did.

I migrate from an old partition last. I always do the system updates first, then launch Migration Manager to finish.

Call me paranoid, but I'd rather not have to do the migration again if something goes wrong with the system updates. It doesn't happen much, but Murphy still hates my guts.

[Jezza]

Nice post, but I would agree with Rusty, I'd migrate from the old partition last. Nice new header as well.