My 15" Powerbook G4 (1.67GHz Superdrive) 80 GB hard drive is getting a little cramped so I'm looking for a bigger drive to replace it with.
Obviously the new drive needs to be just as quiet and fast (or better).
The current drive is reported as Seagate ST9808211A by System Profiler and is apparently rated with a max. transfer speed of 100 MB/sec, rotation speed of 5400 RPM and a noise level of 2.4-3.1 Bels (24-31 Db). It's worked without any issues since 2005.
There doesn't seem to be much to choose from when it comes to 2.5" drives these days, so I'm basically left to choose between the WD1600BEVE (160 GB, WD2500BEVE (250 GB) and WD3200BEVE (320 GB) "Scorpio Blue" models from Western Digital. Are these any good or should I search a little harder and hopefully find something by Seagate again?
The reason I'm a little hesitant with Western Digital is that I have a couple of WD10EARS (1 TB) and WD20EARS (2TB) "Green power" drives which has this annoying feature that parks the drive head every 8 seconds or so, causing a lot of waiting and unnecessary tear and wear. They don't exactly advertise this fact (and it can't be disabled, at least not from Mac computers even though there's a DOS tool that used to work with the first batches of these drives when connected to a PC), so I'm worried that all current Western Digital drives might have these "features" (faults).
Are the 2.5" models from Western Digital a safe bet in comparison to my current drive?
Obviously the new drive needs to be just as quiet and fast (or better).
The current drive is reported as Seagate ST9808211A by System Profiler and is apparently rated with a max. transfer speed of 100 MB/sec, rotation speed of 5400 RPM and a noise level of 2.4-3.1 Bels (24-31 Db). It's worked without any issues since 2005.
There doesn't seem to be much to choose from when it comes to 2.5" drives these days, so I'm basically left to choose between the WD1600BEVE (160 GB, WD2500BEVE (250 GB) and WD3200BEVE (320 GB) "Scorpio Blue" models from Western Digital. Are these any good or should I search a little harder and hopefully find something by Seagate again?
The reason I'm a little hesitant with Western Digital is that I have a couple of WD10EARS (1 TB) and WD20EARS (2TB) "Green power" drives which has this annoying feature that parks the drive head every 8 seconds or so, causing a lot of waiting and unnecessary tear and wear. They don't exactly advertise this fact (and it can't be disabled, at least not from Mac computers even though there's a DOS tool that used to work with the first batches of these drives when connected to a PC), so I'm worried that all current Western Digital drives might have these "features" (faults).
Are the 2.5" models from Western Digital a safe bet in comparison to my current drive?
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