Apple Serial Number Lookup

The hard drive or solid state drive is where all your documents, data and applications are stored permanently. Below this box are all the drives we do that are guaranteed 100% compatible with this Mac, based off the Serial Number or Model ID that you have selected.

The list below is divided into sections for the main types of drives, which can include:

• Solid State Drives (SSDs) - large chunks of Flash memory used for storage, the fastest and most reliable option, but also the smallest and most expensive.
• Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) - the standard rotational drives used in older Macs. Big and cheap, but much slower than SSDs and subject to mechanical failures that do not effect SSDs. These have a spin speed measured in Revolutions Per Minute (RPM), with higher numbers being faster operating drives.
• Hybrid drives. These are HDDs with small SSDs built into them, which are used to cache commonly accessed files (an automatic process handled by the drive itself). How much benefit you get from a hybrid drive depends very much on how you use your drive - if you tend to load the same few GB of data multiple times (eg booting the machine and loading the same applications each morning), the hybrid will help a lot with that. For heavier or more random usage, you will not be getting as much benefit since much of what you are accessing will not be cached onto the SSD portion - a non-hybrid drive may work faster for this sort of usage than a hybrid, if the hybrid has a slower RPM.

For more details on the differences between these drives, please see this post on our blog.

With most Macs there are lots of options for having more or faster storage, and many can take multiple drives so you can mix and match SSDs and rotational hard drives to find your ideal combination of size, speed and budget. Some Macs have more than one main drive bay, and many Macs can use our range of caddies to replace their DVD drives with additional hard drives or SSDs. Some Macs also have additional drive bays that can be used with a mounting kit. If you have multiple types of bay in this Mac, you can select them with the grey tabs below this box.

It is very important with all system drives (that is, a drive that you boot from) to leave a good amount of free space to allow the system to work well. We recommend leaving around 20-30GB of free space on the system drive, The closer you get to full on your system drive, the slower the Mac will perform.

A 1TB drive can hold:

• Up to 1,000 hours of digital video
• Up to 250 two-hour DVD films
• Up to 320,000 digital photos
• Up to 16,660 hours of digital music

All drives come blank and will need to be formatted (erased), and if they are to be a boot drive, have an operating system installed. There are a variety of ways of restoring your data, either through time machine or by cloning. We sell drives, tools, enclosures and cables for you to do the work at home (see the "Cables, Adaptors & Tools" tab above), or you can send/bring your machine to us for us to do the work - prices all below. However you do it, you can be sure you are getting the correct part with our 100% compatibility guarantee.