Changing the hard drive on a Mac tower

There are different

hard drive configurations

depending on whether your Mac tower has a G5 or an Intel processor.

The G5 model has slots for two hard drives located at the back near the top. To get access to these, you'll need to flip the tabs that hold each hard drive in place and remove the two cables that connect each drive. If you do happen to have two hard drives installed, you'll need to remove the drive on the bottom before getting to the drive on top.

Each hard drive slides in using rubber bumpers. If you want to

install a new hard drive

spare bumpers can generally be found inside the hard drive compartment attached to the side panel. To replace the hard drives, you'll need to slide in the top hard drive first before sliding in the bottom one. Connect the two cables to each hard drive and then flip the locking tab to secure the hard drives.

On the newer Intel Mac towers, each hard drive is located on a numbered sled that can be easily removed without needing to mess about with cables. Once you've removed the sled, you can remove the hard drive from it by simply unscrewing the four screws that hold it in place. These are made so that they can't be fully removed from the sled.

To put a new hard drive in, you'll want to put a drive into an empty sled ensuring that the screw holes line up and that the

serial ATA

connectors are pointing to the back. Screw the drive into place and then slide the sled back into the compartment. If for some reason it doesn't go in all the way, check to make sure that the lever that unlocks the side panel is all the way up as that will prevent drives from being removed or replaced.