Powerbook HD Worth Upgrading?

[Sutekidane]

I was thinking of replacing the stock, 60gb 4200RPM Toshiba HD in my 1.33ghz 15" Albook with a Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM HD. I've been playing World of Warcraft a lot lately, and I have noticed that the only time the game really stutters is when I hear the hard drive ticking, reading data. Because of this I believe that WoW is somewhat demanding for HD speed which would explain why it runs poorly on many notebooks.

Should I make the upgrade? I won't be gettting any extra space. Is the speed alone worth it?

 

[heaven]

I think that there wont be any big difference..
Why dont you get yourself an external HD? You'll get more space and a faster drive Have a look here

 

[Bear]

I think that there wont be any big difference..
Why dont you get yourself an external HD? You'll get more space and a faster drive Have a look here

And another brick to carry. Some people get a laptop computer so it can be portable.

 

[Bear]

...
Should I make the upgrade? I won't be gettting any extra space. Is the speed alone worth it?

The speed alone should be worth it. You might check to see if there are larger 7200RPM notebook drives available now. This keeps changing.

 

[TLRedhawke]

The 7200RPM drive is solid, and drastically improves access times. If you can afford it, go for it. I would suggest either selling, or buying an enclosure for the old hard drive, so that it's not put out of use.

The argument against an external drive is that despite the higher speed, it's limited by the Firewire port. The ATA bus has much much better transfer rates than Firewire, and as such, it's the better option.

 

[Sutekidane]

Thanks for all the replies. I do have an external HD and would never play WoW off of it. I think that the HD is one of the few bottlenecks in all notebooks today, since many of the other features have become so similar with their desktop counterparts. I don't see why I wouldn't have a very noticeable improvement in game performance.

 

[tateusmaximus]

i wouldnt bother pulling apart your whole PB if youre not going to stick a 100G 72oorpm drive in it!

the only prob then is the extra heat given off by the bigger hdd makes the PB hotter and the fans are used more frequently.

i think someone here has already done it and said his fans are now constanly on.

ill be ditching my 60G when my warranty runs out

 

[diamond geezer]

How much RAM do you have? If you have less than 512MB you should upgrade that first.

 

[Sutekidane]

Ok, update. I ended up buying a Seagate 100GB 5400RPM hard drive for my powerbook. My powerbook is in repair at apple right now, so I haven't had a chance to install it yet and post information. It also has an 8MB cache. I will have a total of 768MB of ram, which is probably enough for me as I don't really do to much. I've taken apart my powerbook before and it's quite easy, especially compared to the dual usb ibook g3s.

 

[n0de]

Good Choice

Check out barefeats dot com. they have done all of this research for us. Unless you are working with really large files, the 5400 drive has better benchmarks than the 7200 on the powerbook.

It does make a difference. My rev b 12" showed about 12% overall improvement after upgrading to a 7200.

Pumping up to a full 1.25GB would probably be your nest bet though.