In need of a new hard drive for my old G5 computer

Hello there, I'm not as savvy as you are with computers but I am in need of a new hard drive for my old G5 computer that my husband uses.  His crashed.  If you did it all over again would you buy the same new hard drive?  If so, where did you buy it?  I don't even know where to start and was SO happy to find this recent post on installing new drives into the G5.  Any advice would be much appreciated.  Thank you!
<Title Edited by Host>

I actually just ran across this hard drive oddity for the first time myself just yesterday. It seems that some older Macs may not be able to use the newest SATA interfaces on some hard drives.
I an attempt to not get overly technical, SATA is the current interface type on computer hard drives. You can get some additional information from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA. There are currently three revisions, SATA-1 (the oldest), SATA-2 (the current version), & SATA-3 (the latest and greatest).
So what happened was that my G5 could not use the SATA-3 drive I purchased because the computer could not support the SATA-3 standard. It was possible to "slow down" one of the other test SATA-3 drives to make it work like a SATA-2 and so it may be possible to do the same to other hard drives.
To answer your question, I would NOT purchase the saem hard drive for my Mac as it does not work for this older Mac.
My suggestion, if you can find one purchase the same hard drive that was in the computer. That way you know it is compatible. If you would like to upgrade, you will have to do some looking. Although I cannot recommend a specific drive, my two favorite companies are Seagate, www.seagate.com and Western Digitial, www.wdc.com. You most likely have a 3.5" drive, if you have a desktop, 2.5" for a laptop. WD has the Cavier line and Seagate has either Barrcuda or Momentus. What you are looking for is capacity.
So, both Seagate and Western Digital are good. You need a 3.5" drive for a desktop or 2.5" drive for a laptop. Stick with a SATA-2 drive also known as a SATA 3Gb/s drive for compatibility. Get a drive that is 7200 RPM or higher. Finally purchase the largest capacity at you can afford. Amazon is a good general place to been looking.
KWCitizen_Apple

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