What Hard Drive Can I use?

Ok stupid question time. I want to get a firewire enclosure and put 3.5 hard drive in it for my mac mini. Can I buy any old hard drive and jam it into the box or do I have to buya hard drive that is specific for the Mac? I mean are hard drives mac or pc specific or are the just hard drives and formatted to the pc or mac when you buy them? I am sorry for the dumb question but I have been a PC user for years and am pretty new to the Mac world (only 1 year so far). Thanks for the reponse.

Just curious what should I be looking for with
regards to the enclosure? I mean is the Vantec
Nextstar 355 the only one I can use? I was hoping to
find one a little cheaper than $69.
I'm new to Mac as well. I've only had mine about 2 months. As far as HDD Exclosures, you should be able to find an enclosure for less than $69. A couple things to look out for when buying an enclosure is to look at the drive size capability. I've seen enclosures that at in the $30 price, but some stop at the 200Gb size range, where the ones in the $70 range, will support the larger drives like 500Gb. Now, this isn't always the case, as I have seen some expencive enclosures that don't support beyond 200Gb drives.
Now, if you decide to buy the enclosure, and drive as seperate pieces, you're drive will most likely not be partitioned, or formatted, as this is normally the case with boxed Western Digital, Maxtor, etc... So you'd need to take care of that with the Drive Utility that's part of your Mac after it's in the enclosure and connected to the Mac.
As a side note, I was down at my local CompUSA and they had a 160 Gb External LaCie Firewire drive at $139.00. This was a better buy for me, as I didn't need to buy the components, didn't need to put them together, and was less money than buying a 160Gb drive and enclosure. The LaCie drive was formatted FAT32, which I quicly changed to the Mac Journaled File System.
Timothy N. Couch

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