OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Get a New Hard Drive

Depending on how old your Mac is, a faster hard drive could provide a substantial speedup. Because you have a Mac with an Intel processor (’cause Macs with older PowerPC processors can’t run Mountain Lion), the internal hard drive that came with your Mac is probably pretty fast already. Unless you also need more storage space, a new hard drive is probably not the best way to spend your bucks.

On the other hand, if you have an older model, a faster (and larger) hard drive — whether FireWire, USB, or Thunderbolt — could be just the ticket. FireWire and Thunderbolt are the fastest busses (data pathways) you can use for external devices on most Macs.

FireWire, considered (until quite recently) the state of the art in connecting devices that need fast transfer speeds, is used to connect devices that require high-speed communication with your Mac — hard drives, CD burners, scanners, camcorders, and such. It’s also the fastest bus that many Macs support natively.

Note that all current Mac models that do have FireWire have a type called FireWire 800. It uses a different type of cable from FireWire 400, which was found on older Macs. If you get a device that has FireWire 400, and your Mac has only FireWire 800 (or vice versa), it’ll work as long as you get a FireWire 400-to-FireWire-800 adapter cable, available at the Apple Store and many other places.

Thunderbolt, which ...