Video:Instal a Serial ATA Hard drive in a Mac

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Transcript:Instal a Serial ATA Hard drive in a Mac

Hi, I'm Ken for About.com and today we're going to install a new serial ATA hard drive into your Mac computer.

Supplies to Install a Serial ATA Hard Drive

Some of the materials you're going to need are a new serial ATA hard drive and a small screwdriver.

Ground the Mac Before Installing the Hard Drive

So today we're going to be working on a G5. Some of the older G4 and earlier models use IDE internal hard drives but this uses a serial ATA hard drive. Before you install a new hard drive, make sure your computer is off. And make sure you ground yourself because you can shock the computer which can actually harm some internal components. Now, after you have grounded yourself, you want to unplug the power cable from the back of the computer.

Where to Install the Serial ATA Drive

Open up the latch, which will allow the side panel of your computer to open up. Now, once you have your Mac tower opened up, you'll see that there is a slot ready for internal hard drives. We're going to be installing serial ATA hard drives which actually have a power supply and a serial ATA cord built directly into the computer case. You can see right to the side of the case is 4 small screws. What you're going to need is a small Phillips head screwdriver to take out these screws and place them on the sides of your serial ATA hard drive.

Install the Serial ATA Hard Drive

We want to put these screws on the first and last holes on the sides of your serial ATA hard drive. Okay, so now that we have our screws in place, what we want to do is locate where the power supply and the serial ATA cable will go in and the other side where there's no inputs. We want the side that has no plugs in it to go into the back of the computer. Make sure you line up the screws to the small slots that are designed for the screws. Once you have those in place, simply push it directly in and it will slide directly into place.

Hook Up the Serial ATA Drive to the Mac

All you have to do now is plug in your serial ATA cable and your power supply. On the right side will be your serial ATA cable. Push that right in. Next, take the power supply and push that right in. And now your second serial ATA hard drive is plugged in to your Mac computer. Now we need to put the side panel back on our Mac tower. First thing you want to do is make sure our lock is open in the back. Take our panel, make sure the bottom lip sticks right into the bottom of our computer case. Push it flush up against the computer case and push your lock back in place.

When you restart, it will recognize from OSX that it is another additional hard drive. You may need to reformat the hard drive if it is not already formatted as a Mac hard drive. You will want to do this in Disk Utilities.

Thank you for watching. To learn more, visit us on the Web at About.com.