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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Anyone using a 7200rpm hard drive in their laptop?
Brian Tietz, Photographer
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Lexington | KY | USA | Posted: 12:18 PM on 12.08.04 |
->> I am about to buy a bottom of the line g4 ibook and thinking about replacing the OEM 30 gb 4200rpm HD with the Hitachi/IBM 7k60 travelstar 60gb 7200 rpm drive.
As far as I know it is the only one out there right now. Is anybody using it, and is it worth it? |
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C.D. McGonigal, Photographer
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Leesburg | FL | USA | Posted: 1:16 PM on 12.08.04 |
| ->> You will most definitely notice an increase in speed. Aside from upgrading your system memory, upgrading to a faster Hard Drive is the best thing you can do, especially from a 4200 RPM HD. Replacing an iBook HD isn't the easiest thing to do though. |
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Brian Light, Photographer
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Pennsville | NJ | USA | Posted: 2:19 PM on 12.08.04 |
| ->> Keep in mind the changing a HD in an iBook is not for the faint of heart. There are a ton of screws of varying size and I do believe a possible voiding of warranty issue in the process if you do it yourself. |
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randy kramer, Photographer
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ventura | ca | usa | Posted: 3:15 PM on 12.08.04 |
->> I have the 7200 with a gig of memory in my laptop(8600 dell) and it outperformed my desktop until just recently.
1.6M vs Athlon 2500+ with 512 and 120 gb 7200 WD. I really can't compare it to anything else I have owned or seen. |
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Nik Habicht, Photographer
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Trenton | NJ | USA | Posted: 4:01 PM on 12.08.04 |
| ->> My Dell 8100 (bought in Feb. 2002) was really slowing down earlier this fall. Memory was maxed out at 512, so I swapped out the harddrive with the travelstar. It's like using a new computer. Boot and shutdown are much faster, applications load quickly, and photoshop responds more efficiently. I highly recommend a 7200 rpm hard drive.... |
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Dave Amorde, Photographer
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Lake Forest | CA | USA | Posted: 5:15 PM on 12.08.04 |
| ->> Nik, did you try defragmenting your HD before the replacement? A lot of people see an improvement when installing a new HD, but much of that improvement comes from a lack of file fragmentation, spyware, etc. |
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Greg Ferguson, Photographer
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Scottsdale | Az | USA | Posted: 8:50 PM on 12.08.04 |
->> I put one in my G4 Titanium PB after the original drive died. It is a lot faster.
I partitioned it into 20GB and 40 GB partitions with the 40GB for my photos and company stuff. Apps and the system are on the other.
Since you have a functioning but slower drive inside the machine, why not buy an external drive instead? For the same money you can get a good sized external and end up with a lot more storage. |
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Noel Vasquez, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Santa Barbara | ca | USA | Posted: 9:15 PM on 12.08.04 |
->> your gonna have a beast of a time trying to replace the hard drive from an ibook. it's totally barried inside the ibook.
i do know there is a site, can't remeber the name of it, that'll show you step by step w/ pictures what screws to remove and what not to remove the hd of an ibook.
about performance upgrade, you'll totally feel the speed increase from a 4200 to either 5400 to 7200. here's a link on barefeats.com that compares the different speed hd's in a powerbook. it's in the middle of the page
http://barefeats.com/pb12.html |
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Noel Vasquez, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Santa Barbara | ca | USA | Posted: 9:31 PM on 12.08.04 |
->> http://www.pbfixit.com/Guide/
here's the site i mentioned, except they don't have ibook g4 (they have g3), but i think they're practically the samething on the inside.
they have powerbook guides as well |
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Michael T Myers, Photographer
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Charlotte | NC | USA | Posted: 11:48 PM on 12.08.04 |
->> Before you put in the new drive remember the G4 ibook wasnt designed to for that drive. The heat that will come off that baby can cook your motherboard sooner than you think. Plus the Apple guys might not cover it under a warranty since most consider it a Apple Mod.
I cooked mine with a different drive at it was in the Titanium that could really handle it. Plastic doesnt.
Make sure you put the screws back in the same hole that came out of. Cause some are either shorter, longer, wider than most. Even for my Guru buddy, laptops arent something they like to mess with unless they have too.
Check this out - Chuck Burton - AP head for Charlotte has this set up on his ibook G4:
1 fw 7200rpm external hd, 2 fw readers, on a fw hub that is plugged into the fw port on the ibook and also powered by the ibook. I watched him use it at a Panthers game. If it works for him - it will work for you and not cause any internal heat problems. |
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Wynn Rujiraviriyapinyo, Photographer
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Los Angeles | CA | USA | Posted: 12:58 AM on 12.09.04 |
->> Hey Brian, I did this a few months ago to my Powerbook Titanium 1ghz w/ 1gb ram a few months ago. I definitely notice a speed difference in both the responsiveness of the system itself (opening/closing windows, etc.) and within programs - mainly Photoshop. It's not a crazy increase like, say, going from using 128 megs of ram to 512 megs, but you will notice it.
The drive is noiser than the stock 4200 drive and it does run a bit hotter. But two things I'm willing to live with for the increase in speed.
Dave brings up a good point about the perceived speed increase from an a drive that has been in use and filled with apps, versus a freshly formatted drive. I was worried about the same thing, so I ran the benchmarks on clean drives. To see my results, visit this link here:
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=81998&doc2=56639 |
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Julian Jenkins, Photographer
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Canyon Country | CA | USA | Posted: 5:00 AM on 12.09.04 |
->> I agree with Michael. The heat will cook your motherboard. There's a reason Apple didn't load their laptops with 7200's and the rap artist Nelly said it best:
"It's getting hot in here"
Julian |
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Brian Tietz, Photographer
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Lexington | KY | USA | Posted: 9:09 AM on 12.09.04 |
->> Thanks for all the input!
Cracking into the ibook and replacing the hard drive looks a lot more daunting of a task than doing the swap in my old G3 Lombard. And Apple Care has come to my rescue too many times for me to void the warranty.
I thought one of Apple's mantras was to make things easy.
I'm definately rethinking things and most likely will go with an external.
By the way the specs on that 7200 rpm drive state that it is designed to stay as cool or cooler than a 5400 rpm drive so heat should not be a huge deal for anyone else thinking about swapping drives.
-tietz |
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Greg Ferguson, Photographer
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Scottsdale | Az | USA | Posted: 5:47 PM on 12.09.04 |
->> I think that external will end up being more flexible in the long run.
You can either get a bigger size with lots of space, or a more conservative one that's small and more easily carried.
Either way, you can use the PB by itself if you need to go light and move with cat-like swiftness. |
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Nik Habicht, Photographer
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Trenton | NJ | USA | Posted: 3:16 AM on 12.10.04 |
->> Dave Amorde,
Yes --- I've cleaned and defragged regularly, run antivirus and anti spyware software religiously, and try to leave a quarter to third of the drive vacant. We'll see what happens in another year or two....
BTW, other Dell power users I know have reported being similarly underwhelmed with the standard drives.... |
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Ron Scheffler, Photographer
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Hamilton (Toronto area) | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 12:05 PM on 12.10.04 |
->> I just had a Fujitsu 60GB 5400 rpm drive installed in my ancient iBook G3 600 MHz. We'll see if it fries the MB. At least it will be an excuse to get a new PB.
What I have noticed so far, is what seems to be improved performance with start up speed, but also certain apps seem to be happier. Part of that is probably due to a lot more free space (vs. the 20 GB original drive) as well as partitioning 10GB strictly as a scratch disk. Photo Mechanic now is much faster in loading full resolution previews, as well as showing entire contact sheets - and that was one of the objectives of this upgrade.
I'd read a few reviews and it seemed to me that in general, there wasn't enough of a significant performance gain in the 7200 vs. the 5400 drives, hence my reason to stick with the 5400.
Time will tell... |
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Larry Vaughn, Photographer
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Gainesville | FL | usa | Posted: 12:27 PM on 12.17.04 |
->> Same thing with my Presario laptop. You can run free tests at www.pcpitstop.com
Everything tested fine, except for the hard drive speed from the 4200 rpm drive. Unusually slow it said.
I have read that the faster drives don't pull any more battery power than the slow ones. |
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Richard Johnson, Photographer, Assistant
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Marietta | GA | USA | Posted: 10:29 PM on 12.17.04 |
->> I suggest anyone considering a Mac upgrade venture over to:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com
This is a great site for upgrading any Mac. There is a huge database on drive upgrades and I'm sure the drive/notebook combination you are considering has been already done by others. Good starting point for info.
If I recall correctly, the 7200 drives do not run any hotter than 5400's. I think the reason why PowerBooks aren't shipped with the 7200's is manufacturing cost, not any heat issue. |
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Billy Suratt, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Russell Springs | KY | USA | Posted: 10:11 AM on 12.18.04 |
->> I recently replaced the hard drive in my Toshiba craptop with an IBM/Hitachi TravelStar 7k60 and the difference has been night and day. The heat is minimal because my stupid processor gets hot enough to fry eggs anyway and the new drive runs much quieter than the POS it replaced (and it's 3x bigger).
I'm now booting in less than 30 seconds, Photoshop 7 starts up in less than 10 and Photo Mechanic can handle 1,000+ Mark II JPEGs a lot more eloquently. With 7,200 RPMs and an 8MB cache, the drive can't be beat.
When I did the upgrade, I put the new drive in an ADS Pyro 2.5 firewire drive enclosure and used Casper XP software to clone my old drive onto the new one (Casper's PC only, but it's great because it can extend the partition automatically when cloning to a larger drive).
I put the old one in the enclosure after swapping out the drives, so now I've got a small, slow and noisy external backup drive. lol I'm planning to get another 7k60 for the external enclosure later on, so then I'll be able to use it for daily data backups.
The 7k60 rocks!!! |
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Kirby Yau, Student/Intern
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El Cajon | CA | USA | Posted: 1:39 AM on 01.04.05 |
| ->> Brian I have a 60 gig 7200 rpm hitachi in a 12" Apple Powerbook and I couldn't be happier, the drive is snappy and the heat output is about the same if not just a little hotter. The only downside is that battery life is but by a good 30+ minutes. But I echo Billy's comments "The 7K60 rocks!!" |
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