[devmage]

I have an original Dual 2Ghz G5, I bought one as soon as they had them in my Apple store.

The drive in it was always a bit noisy but the oddest thing is it squeaked. In addition to the drive grind you are used to here there is this squeak. It has got much worse of the years and now it is driving me batty. I keep thinking one day the drive is just going to explode.

So I think I want to replace the drive, I was thinking of just throwing a 160GB drive in to replace the one I have. I also thought maybe putting one of those 76GB 10k RPM drives in to run the system and WoW off of (WoW likes to access the disk) and just get a big honking drive for data.

I've noticed the External FW drive I have performs better than my system drive, someone told me the SATA controler in the G5 leaves much to be desired so I am wondering 2 things.

1) Would an original G5 make much use of a 10K RPM drive, anyone have any Xbench Results?

2) Any one else heard of this squeaking problem

[G5man]

the 10K RPM will be able to make good because it is the hard drive that does the RPM and not the computer but I may be wrong.

[Al G]

A 10K RPM Raptor is a little faster in a G5, but not much over the newer model 7200 RPM drives. Personally, it's not worth it to me to be limited to 74Gigs--even when the 7200 RPM drives were slower, I chose not to be limited in size. Check barefeats.com, they just did a test that compares some new drives.

However, an internal SATA drive should be faster than an external firewire drive. I haven't heard of any signfican't performance problems with the G5's SATA controller. Either there's something wrong with your drive or you just have a slow model.

As for the squeak, are you sure it's from the drive? There are a couple fans right next to the hard drive and it's possible that one has a bad bearing.