When the time comes to upgrade your Mac Pro’s storage capacity, you will discover that installing a new hard drive is dead simple. The inside of a Mac Pro’s case is very clean and organize, and installing a the new disk really requires a minimal amount of effort. This tutorial may be long, but that is only because I went into excruciating detail for every step. Read on to learn how to install a new hard drive in your Mac Pro computer.
Before you can get started, you must purchase the right hard drive for your Mac Pro. According to Apple, you need to use a 3 GBs SATA drive that measures 3.9″ × 5.7″ × 1.0″ (width × depth × height). That means don’t buy an IDE drive! The hard drive used in this tutorial is a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda SATA internal hard drive
Open the Case
Shut down your Mac Pro, give it a few minutes to cool off, and unplug all the wires and cables. Place the tower on a sturdy surface. Locate the latch on the back of the case and pull it out. The latch lifts out very easily and stops after an inch or two — do not try to force it any farther.
Opening this latch releases the side panel of your Mac Pro, which you should now be able to easily lift away from the case. Take it off and put it in a safe place.
Install the new hard drive
With the Mac Pro’s case now open, locate the four hard drive bays in the top half of the case. They are outlined in red in the photo below.
Each bay has a number stamped on it, and they go in order from left to right. Bay #1 should contain the stock hard drive that was installed by Apple. Gently remove the bracket from the next empty hard drive bay — if you only purchased one hard drive with your computer, this should be bay #2. You do not need any tools to remove the empty bay’s bracket; it should easily slide out.
Remove your new hard drive from its packaging and use a phillips head screw drive to attach it to the bracket. Use the screws that are already included on the bracket. Orient the drive as shown in the pictures below, so that the connectors face the rear of the case when the bracket is placed back in the hard drive bay.
Gently push the bracket with your new hard drive into the empty bay in your Mac Pro case. There is no need to use any tools or much force — the bracket should easily slide into the bay and the hard drive should click into place.
Boot up and set-up
Re-connect all your wires and cables, boot up your Mac Pro, and look for a new hard drive icon to appear on your desktop. At this point I prefer to format a hard drive for Mac OS X and give it a name. To do so, head into the Disk Utility application. Disk Utility is located in /Applications/Utilities. If you have a recent version of OS X, just hit CMD+Space and do a spotlight search for “Disk Utility”.
In Disk Utility, start by locating your new hard drive in the right hand sidebar. Warning: make sure you are absolutely sure which entry is your new hard drive. Your Macintosh HD - your system disk - is also listed here. If you accidentally format your system disk, you will lose your operating system, your settings, and all of your documents, pictures, music, and files. As you can see in the screenshot below, I can easily tell the difference because my Macintosh HD is 500 GB, and my new drive is 1 TB (931.5 GB).
Now, are you sure you have clicked on the correct disk? The new, blank drive? Go to the “Erase” tab and choose a format for your drive. I used the same format as my system disk - Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Use the “name” field to give your new drive a friendly name. Press the “Erase…” button to begin the formatting process.
The alert box shown below will pop up and ask you to confirm that you wish to erase the disk. As long as you are positive that you have chosen to erase the new, blank disk and not a different existing hard drive that already contains important data, click “Erase” to confirm.
When the formatting process completes, your new hard drive will be ready to go.
