MacGurus: ATA Drives

Most hard drive manufacturers have discontinued the ATA line so availability is slim and spotty. Hitachi still offers the their superior T7K500 models - in our opinion, the cream of the crop.

MacGurus endorses the selection of larger cache models for added performance. Cache is just RAM attached to the circuit board of the hard drive. Operating at RAM speeds, a larger cache can accelerate small data transfers to the maximum speed of the bus the drive is installed on. This is especially beneficial to your OS installation and applications and will act as a buffer preventing stuttering and dropped frames in video and audio recordings.

All ATA drives on this page are fully compatible with any *ATA33, ATA66, ATA100 or ATA133 bus in a Mac. Mixing ATA drives is not a problem either as only one drive is accessed at any given time on a single channel one drive cannot affect the other. *Note: B&W Revision 1 computers have a fault in the onboard ATA33 controller and will usually not accept a newer specification, higher capacity hard drive than those that it originally shipped. To be safe it is recommended you install either an ATA host card or an SATA Host Card to replace the faulty motherboard controller. This will protect your precious data, the only reason a computer has for being.

Western Digital or Hitachi Deskstar are listed as they are available. Supplies are really hit or miss. We will try and maintain this page with latest availability.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives. Seagate has discontinued all manufacture of ATA drives.