THE HARD DRIVE is one of the most vulnerable parts of an old computer. Moving parts are always vulnerable to wear and tear, and unlike modern solid–state drives (SSDs), the hard drive had to be in motion when data was read from or written to the storage medium.
Another problem with old hard drives is they’re likely to be small. When the first Intel–powered Macs were released, they had as little as 160GB of storage off the shelf for the iMac, and a minuscule 60GB for the Mac mini or MacBook. What can you do with so little storage these days?
If you’re lucky enougholder PowerPC processor you can only boot it from a FireWire drive, but Intel Macs can be booted from a USB drive.
