powerbook harddrive crapped out on me

Hej Matt,

I have had really good luck with the Toshiba 80GB 5400rpm drive in my PowerBook (it is what apple used). I also have the same drive in an external case. My drive did die about a year after I had it, but apple fixed that right up.

If you go to newegg.com, you can find this drive for about $137, or you can go for a different brand and save some money.

Kimo

I would go for a 7,200 rpm hard drive- should be alot faster than your old 4,200 rpm hd.

dmw007 said:

I would go for a 7,200 rpm hard drive- should be alot faster than your old 4,200 rpm hd.

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Possibly at the expense of battery life and might run hotter than usual.

It's been done before though and I'm thinking about adding a 7,200rpm drive to my powerbook.

(that is if nice shinny new powerbooks aren't around the corner anytime soon)

Honestly, a modern 5400 rpm drive is going to provide a huge speed-up over an old 4200 rpm drive, so going whole-hog to a 7200 rpm drive is probably overkill. Plus, I'm not sure there are any 7200 rpm laptop drives out there that aren't pretty loud (for a laptop). They tend to have a pretty high pitched whine to them that drive me crazy in an otherwise very quiet machine.

I have the same problem (high pitched whine) in the seagate momentus 5400 rpm drive that they included in my mac mini, as well as with the fujitsu 5400 rpm drive that I have in my 1.25 ghz powerbook (80 gb). It's really annoying, as these machines are mostly silent other than hard drive noise.

If you're even marginally concerned about noise, I'd go with a western digital scorpio. All of the sizes are fast and quiet at 5400 rpm. The 40 gb version may be even quieter, as it will only use one disk platter.

7200 rpm drives use only marginally more power than 5400 rpm drives, so I wouldn't worry about it impacting your battery life. I'd be more concerned about noise and cost for the 6 months you're going to use it.

My 2 cents.

You are absolutely right. I never thought about the noise aspect of a 7,200rpm drive. Both my desktop and back up hard drives are 7,200. They're quite loud!!

Thanks

I have the first g4 powerbook 400mhz it only came with a 10gig HD. I replaced it with an IBM travelstar 7200 it didn't make much noise and I didn't really suffer from lower battery life either. 2 1/2 years latter the drive failed and the company I bought it from (transintl) replaced it at no charge with a toshiba 5400 and I don't notice any speed difference. Hope that helps.

P.S. I'll take your 867mhz as a hand me down, my powerbook is starting to show it's age.

EGT said:

Possibly at the expense of battery life and might run hotter than usual.

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The specs on the 7200 RPM laptop drives are pretty much the same as the 5200 RPM drives in terms of heat and battery life. This should not be a factor at all.

Yeah, and since you can access things faster on the 7200 rpm HD, battery life may not be a big issue either. Don't quote me on that, though.

ahh ok, I wasn't too sure about the heat/battery. 2.5" 7200 drives defiantly exist though. I think its seagate that has a 100gb version?

I think someone posted about it a few weeks ago. I can't quite remember.