11-29-2008, 12:33 PM

My Intel Imac's hard drive is developing bad clusters so it is time to replace it with a new one. I was thinking of putting an IBM (Hitachi) Deskstar 7K500 SATAII 500.0GB 16MB cache.

Can I buy the 'PC version' of this Hard Drive, or it has to be "specially made" for Mac? I am asking this because a friend of mine has told me that Mac HDD have special connectors (he mentioned "dataport").

Thank you in advance for any reply!

11-29-2008, 12:58 PM

Macs use the same hard drives as PC's do. There is no difference, so yes you can purchase that drive. Just keep in mind that your iMac uses a SATA interface so any drive you purchase must be SATA. (Most newer PCs likewise use SATA.)

The Hitachi drive you mentioned will work.

Regards.

11-29-2008, 05:59 PM

Just a piece of information from the past. The nickname for the IDE version of the IBM drives was "Deathstar" and rightly so from the past. They were very unreliable. Many on this board prefer Maxtor and Western Digital. Stick to those with great warranties. Never heard of anyone using IBM drives in their Macs.

11-29-2008, 06:43 PM

Originally Posted by Chilbear

Just a piece of information from the past. The nickname for the IDE version of the IBM drives was "Deathstar" and rightly so from the past. They were very unreliable. Many on this board prefer Maxtor and Western Digital. Stick to those with great warranties. Never heard of anyone using IBM drives in their Macs.

I know what you are talking about and have owner or serviced MANY system with the IBM DeathStar drives that failed.

The new Hitachi's don't seem to share that issue with the older IBM drives. I have heard very good reports of good reliability from the latest Hitachi's.

There are people here and on other forums running Hitachi's in their Macs.