MacGurus: ATA Drives

MacGurus full selection of ATA drives made by all the major drive manufacturers will meet your every storage need. From the 'speed king' Hitachi 7K250 drives to the reliability of Seagate, we have them all. Today's ATA hard drives are in our opinion, made to similar enough quality control standards as to make choosing one a matter more of taste and past experiences than of picking that one pearl.

Most manufacturers are supplying both 2 MB Cache and 8 MB Cache models. At MacGurus we endorse 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.

The Hitachi T7K320 and T7K400 are 7200 RPM drive that have been a very reliable drive for us. Reaching near 70 MB/sec in peak performance all Hitachi drives have an 8MB cache and an 3 year warranty. Great value for a high quality hard drive.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives. These models provide faster performance, larger capacities and quieter operation. These new drives are the top performers in class, highly recommended for your desktop needs. Perfect for external use in Firewire enclosures. With all the years of long service we have had, it is hard not to choose them to trust with our important data. All Barracudas carry a 5 year warranty. This new industry leading warranty coverage is retroactive to purchases after June 1st 2004. Seagate is intending to discontinue all manufacture of ATA drives in the summer of 2008. Only a few are left in desitribution, so availability is going to be spotty.