upgrading ibook hard drive..5400? or 4700?

[drater]

I have an iBook 12" 1.33ghz. I was stupid and didn't buy it with more than a 40gb hard drive. I want to upgrade it at a local compusa or microcenter, but they are telling me a 5400rpm (or maybe it was a 5200rpm) hard drive will be fine to run in my ibook. I have looked over the net and found many people saying not to get anything more than a 4700rpm hard drive in an ibook because of heat issues. What do you guys think? anyone?

 

[ftaok]

I have an iBook 12" 1.33ghz. I was stupid and didn't buy it with more than a 40gb hard drive. I want to upgrade it at a local compusa or microcenter, but they are telling me a 5400rpm (or maybe it was a 5200rpm) hard drive will be fine to run in my ibook. I have looked over the net and found many people saying not to get anything more than a 4700rpm hard drive in an ibook because of heat issues. What do you guys think? anyone?

A 5400 rpm drive will be fine. These days, 5400 rpm drives don't use as much power or generate as much heat as they did a few years ago. I'm thinking that a 5400 rpm drive will have the same power/heat characteristics that the 4200 rpm drive you have now.

But before you spend the money to have CompUSA or Microcenter replace the HD, you'll want to know what brand/model hard drive they plan to use. Make sure it's new and not refurbished and a decent brand. I replaced the original in my iBook myself with a Toshiba 40GB, 5400rpm, 16MB cache drive.

Also, doing this will pretty much void the Apple warranty. Make sure who ever does the swap warrants their own work. Working in the hinge area is tricky and if the tech isn't careful, he can mess up the wires in teh hinge resulting in video problems or Airport reception problems.

One more thing, get yourself an external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure for the original 40GB drive. You can use it for backups and other stuff.

ft