Advice Needed on Upgrading PowerBook G4 HDD?

[jamieg]

Hi,

I recently replaced my 12" PowerBook G4's 60 gig HDD (due to failure) with a 80 gig HDD (TOSHIBA MK8026GAX).


I'm now running out of space and am looking to upgrade to a 100-120 gig HDD (and put my existing TOSHIBA MK8026GAX HDD in an external FireWire caddy).


After research, my two options are: 1 - TOSHIBA MK1234GAX, 2 - TOSHIBA MK1032GAX. Both offer good performance in my price range.

Option 1 is a 120 gig HDD with a 8MB buffer. Option 2 is a 100 gig HDD with a 16 MB buffer.


Obviously I would like as much space as possible with the best performance. Would I see a large drop in performance going from a 16 MB buffer to an 8MB??


All the drives have similar specs (seek times, etc), besides the buffer being smaller on the 120 gig HDD.


What do I do????


Any Help Greatly Appreciated!

Jamie

 

[jamieg]

I should add, I will be using it for Audio (and some video) work

 

[tuartboy]

I doubt you would see any noticeable difference between the two.

However, I think if you are going to open the thing up again and put in another drive, you might as well do it right and go for the gold. Newegg sells 160gb drives for under $200 and I would think it would be worth your time and money to upgrade to the larger model.

As another 12" PB owner interested in HD upgrades, did you find the process difficult? Are there any looser joints or creaky areas after opening things up and putting it back together. My PB is solid as a rock right now and I would hate to have it start creaking on me and getting all loose.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Why bother buying an expensive 2.5 HD for only 20 or 40 Gb improvement?

Spend less money and do less work by simply getting an external Firewire 3.5" drive of about 250 Gb - 300 Gb. You will be able to have a bootable clone of your system (invaluable for troubleshooting and repair), lots of room for data backups, offload seldom used items off the internal drive to create free space, and the 3.5" drive will be faster than the best internal drive.