Powerbook G4: 4200 RPM HD -> 7200 RPM HD ?

vgoklani said:

Hi,

I have a 1.33GHZ Powerbook G4 with 1.2G of ram and a 4200 RPM drive. I would like to swap out the hard drive, and put in a 60G 7200 RPM Hitachi drive, but I am concerned about the heat dissapation. Has anyone tried this? Does the laptop get really hot?

-V-

Click to expand...

your gunna lose a fair bit of battery life i think, but if you use it mainly for a desktop and occasional portability...then great, cant see any trouble (however more opinions are welcome )

I remember reading about this on BareFeats and I think he addressed the heat and battery issues. If I remember correctly, both were present, but neither were a huge problem.

Check out xlr8yourmac, they have some articles relating to this issue if I remember rightly.

Here's a quick review of the Hitachi Travelstar 80GB, link and a tutorial for a 12" Hard Drive swap.

My advice is to not install the HD yourself. Have an Apple technician install it for you, that way your warranty is safe.

AL-FAMOUS said:

your gunna lose a fair bit of battery life i think, but if you use it mainly for a desktop and occasional portability...then great, cant see any trouble (however more opinions are welcome )

Click to expand...

here's another good article about faster laptop drives and battery life:


laptop drives

seems to be a pretty negligible effect.

Depending on whether your powerbook is a 12, 15, or 17 inch model, the installation is a little different. The 15 inch models do have some tricky clips hidden behind the optical drive. The 17 inch did not give me as much trouble. I have not yet performed a hard drive swap on a 12" but im sure it's not too different from the larger models.

I've found that these higher speed drives don't particularly have much effect on battery life. While it does require more energy to spin faster, the drives do not have to spin as long, as data can be written and accessed more quickly.

Also, these new model Powerbook's get plenty hot already. The slight heat difference these drives make isn't enough to call the fire department over.

You can perform this procedure yourself, instructions are readily available on the internet. Just be prepared to keep track of a lot of really really really tiny screws. Also, realize you'll have to put the 4200 RPM drive back in if you ever want to take it in for service under warranty. If you don't want to worry about voiding your warranty, have an authorized apple service provider do the work.

Congratulations on your new drive, I bet youll notice a huge jump in performance

I have the 60GB 7200RPM HD in my current laptop PC, which I'm going to replace with a PB 15". Should it still work after I reformat it my HD and put it in the PB?

The warranty on my Rev. B 12 incher runs out in February and I am probably going to replace it with the biggest 7200 rpm drive available. What is currently the largest size? Will that change by February? Where is a good place shop for these online?

ive found zipzoomfly to have consistently low prices:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100519

60 GB has been the largest size available for a while now. I'm sure an 80 GB model is in the works. Maybe somebody else has more info on future 2.5" 7200 RPM drives?