12" powerbook battery life

[Romulan]

I'm going to order a 12" powerbook soon, but am stuck on whether or not to upgrade the 60 gig HD to a 5400 80 Gig one. I know later on i'm gonna need the space. Does anybody else who has this configuration notice reduced battery life? I wonder how many hours I could expect after the upgrade. Thank you in advace. Any comments are appreciated.

[jxyama]

i doubt that it will make much difference in the battery life.

[yellow]

I've read some posts by folks saying that they've installed even faster drives in their powerbooks and really didn't notice a huge drop in battery life, maybe 10% total.

That being said, IMO, battery life isn't great in powerbooks. I rarely can get more than 2.5-3 hours out of mine 15" AlPB. I have the 80GB 5400RPM disk in mine.

[JzzTrump22]

Go for the upgrade. Having the extra 20 gigs of space beats the downside of a minor drop in battery life.

[Demon Hunter]

I'm going to order a 12" powerbook soon, but am stuck on whether or not to upgrade the 60 gig HD to a 5400 80 Gig one. I know later on i'm gonna need the space. Does anybody else who has this configuration notice reduced battery life? I wonder how many hours I could expect after the upgrade. Thank you in advace. Any comments are appreciated.

A faster hard drive in your Powerbook should actually increase battery life.

Less seek time means less spinning. :)

[ToastCabbit]

Go ahead and buy the pb with a bigger HD. I did, and am glad because now I have more space to put goodies on. :) And I still get 3+ hours of battery life.

[superbovine]

the answer is here

http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031031/index.html

[Romulan]

Thanks for all of your comments-esp. Bovine (website was really helpful). I think i'm going to order the faster HD.

[ChrisFromCanada]

the answer is here

http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031031/index.html

For all wondering look at the following quote from the article.

Summary: Choose The Faster Hard Drive Whenever Possible.

For users faced with the choice between a standard 4200-rpm hard drive and a faster 5400-rpm or even 7200-rpm model, we would recommend picking the faster-turning drive. Although the battery life will be a few minutes less, the performance increase more than outweighs this relatively small downside. The mere fact that a notebook boots up faster when equipped with a 5400-rpm drive justifies the higher price, in our opinion.

It will only change batery life by minutes most likely.

[Natalia81]

What brand hard drive do the PBs use?

[superbovine]

What brand hard drive do the PBs use?

mine has a TOSHIBA MK4025GAS.

you change check your hard drive model in system profile utility.