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nickday · May 12, 2003, 01:23 PM

Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading the 10gb hard drive in my iBook to something larger... i've seen a 30gb drive that is 5400rpm - the original drive is 4200rpm. Would this make a noticable and worthwhile improvement to disk operations in OS X? Just wondering if it's worth the extra money really...

Cheers,
Nick

Stratus Fear · May 12, 2003, 01:52 PM

Originally posted by nickday:
Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading the 10gb hard drive in my iBook to something larger... i've seen a 30gb drive that is 5400rpm - the original drive is 4200rpm. Would this make a noticable and worthwhile improvement to disk operations in OS X? Just wondering if it's worth the extra money really...

Cheers,
Nick

The faster RPM should make a noticeable difference. Also, generally with the larger drives, the bits density is greater than that of the smaller drives, so even at the same RPM, the larger drive would be faster since the head will pass over more bits as the drive spins. If you really need the extra space, then I'd recommend spending a little more and getting the 5400 RPM drive. There also is the energy usage concern, but the 5400 RPM drive shouldn't use too much more juice than the smaller drive. You shouldn't notice any huge decrease in battery life, if you notice a decrease at all.

davidcarr · May 14, 2003, 12:14 PM

Also, generally with the larger drives, the bits density is greater than that of the smaller drives, so even at the same RPM, the larger drive would be faster since the head will pass over more bits as the drive spins. [/B]

Are you sure about that? Would it really make a noticeable difference?

Powaqqatsi · May 14, 2003, 12:44 PM

Originally posted by davidcarr:
Are you sure about that? Would it really make a noticeable difference?

Yes, he is right. You will feel a difference.

biposto · May 14, 2003, 01:57 PM

I've replaced one in a HP notebook and while I gained some performance I noticed 10-15% decrease in my battery life, might be not because of the swap.
What I also noticed is that the HP feels warmer, I have no tools to measure it, but it really feels warmer.
Maybe you can test 1 out in your iBook and see if the heat/battery is nominal.
(used travelstars btw)

vickster · May 14, 2003, 04:52 PM

I've got an IBM 5400rpm 40gb HD in my 12" iBook 700, but it was upgraded by the previous owner. Alas, I have no previous experience with this computer to compare. Per the original owner, OSX is I/O intensive, so the extra HD speed can't hurt, and I certainly don't notice it getting any warmer than any other laptop I've used...

vickster

kjb · May 14, 2003, 08:21 PM

The 5400 rpm drives make a remarkable difference. I just upgraded the 15 gig 4200 rpm IBM to a Toshiba 5400 40 gigger. This is on a 500 mhz, 66 mhz bus machine w/ 640 gigs of ram. The speed is now more than acceptable. App launch times are greatly sped up, as is boot and shut down. The drive is noticably quieter than the previous, but I will say it has been at the expense of battery life. I get maybe 1.5 hours now, where I was getting almost 2 on the dot. granted, this is a 17 month old battery, but life is short.

Overall, I'd say the extra $$ is worth it. I bought my toshiba from newegg for $128 shipped. Not too bad.

OT: if you're planning on ripping your machine apart to upgrade the HD, you might as well upgrade your optical drive as well. I went from a CDROM to a 16x DVD/CDRW from sony. I got the sony drive on ebay for $150.

K

gatorparrots · 10:29 AM

A 5400RPM drive is nearly 30% faster than a 4200 RPM drive. The difference is definitely noticeable and appreciable.

Of course, an external 7200RPM FireWire drive is even faster... (over 70% faster) so the ideal scenario would be to have both an internal 5400RPM drive and an external 7200RPM drive.

iamnid · May 14, 2003, 11:08 PM

Originally posted by gatorparrots:
A 4200RPM drive is nearly 30% faster than a 5400 RPM drive. The difference is definitely noticeable and appreciable.

Of course, an external 7200RPM FireWire drive is even faster... (over 70% faster) so the ideal scenario would be to have both an internal 5400RPM drive and an external 7200RPM drive.

I think you mean that a 5400 drive is 30% faster than a 4200 RPM drive.

escher · May 15, 2003, 12:53 AM

Originally posted by kjb:
I'd say the extra $$ is worth it. I bought my toshiba from newegg for $128 shipped. Not too bad.

Googlegear.com also has great prices on the IBM/Hitachi Travelstar drives, including the 40GNX for $130.5 shipped and the 80GB 80GN for $285 shipped.

I'm thinking about dropping a 40GB 40GNX in my iBook/500 as well, although I'd be too cheap to upgrade the CD-ROM. I have an external CD-RW, which serves me well enough. My only hangup is that I'm afraid of taking apart the iBook. It's a daunting task.

Escher

RevEvs · May 15, 2003, 08:28 AM

read about a internal 7200rpm drive coming out soon, bit im guessing that it would totally kill the batter life. Im going to be updrading to a 5400rpm drive this summer, and probably upping the clock to a 600/100 from the current 500/66 at the same time... cant wait

revs

escher · May 15, 2003, 01:02 PM

The following two sites have good iBook HDD install instructions. We've mentioned them in other threads, but I thought I'd add them for the record.

http://norum.homeunix.net/~carl/mods/
and
http://uk.geocities.com/ibookupgrade/

I'll probably be doing a HDD swap a few weeks from now. I'll definitely go slowly but shurely and tape the removed screws to template printouts to ease reassembly.

Escher

nickday · May 16, 2003, 12:33 PM

Thanks for all your replies, very helpful indeed.

Originally posted by RevEvs:
read about a internal 7200rpm drive coming out soon, bit im guessing that it would totally kill the batter life. Im going to be updrading to a 5400rpm drive this summer, and probably upping the clock to a 600/100 from the current 500/66 at the same time... cant wait

revs

Yes, i'm planning on doing just that too. I've found somebody willing to do the overclock mod for me for �20, who manufactures motherboards for a living, so he should be up for it. Should be MUCH faster.

Nick

RevEvs · May 16, 2003, 02:37 PM

Originally posted by nickday:
Yes, i'm planning on doing just that too. I've found somebody willing to do the overclock mod for me for �20, who manufactures motherboards for a living, so he should be up for it. Should be MUCH faster.

Nick

Take lots of pics then

I intend on doing the soldering myself, have a bit of experience, not much tho (heck ill risk it

)

Which hard drive have you been looking at, i was looking at the IBM 40GNx (20 Gig), seen it for �82 on Dabs, not looked around to find a cheaper one yet...

revs

MacSI · May 25, 2003, 12:33 AM

Originally posted by nickday:
Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading the 10gb hard drive in my iBook to something larger... i've seen a 30gb drive that is 5400rpm - the original drive is 4200rpm. Would this make a noticable and worthwhile improvement to disk operations in OS X? Just wondering if it's worth the extra money really...

Cheers,
Nick

I have recently changed the original HD (10GB, Toshiba MK1017GAP) in a 500 MHz iBook (with 320 MB RAM) to a 40 GB 5400 rpm drive (Toshiba MK4019GAX). It has drastically improved disk-intensive tasks. I have compared the time needed for booting up (OS 10.2.3) and launching Adobe photoshop 7. ( To make sure that the comparison is fair, I did the measurements only after I have restored the original settings to the new HD. The numbers are the average of two trials.)

Boot-up: old: 3 minutes 10 seconds
new: 1 minutes 30 seconds

Photoshop: old: 52 seconds
new: 29 seconds

In addition, the faster HD does not "appear" to affect the battery life. I used to get 3+ hours out of a fully charged battery and now I still have 3+ hours (no actual measurement here). For me, this is a worthwhile operation. I gain storgae space and at the same time the feeing of a speedier computer. One drawback; however, the new HD is clearly making more noise than the old HD.

Good luck,

Doncom · May 30, 2003, 12:03 AM

Thank you MacSI! This is exactly what I wanted to hear! I plan on doing the exact same upgrade (Toshiba drive from newegg.com) on the same 500MHZ iBook!

My last drive bummed out . . . it just makes loud clicking noises when opening some applications because it was dropped some time ago.

But now, I can't wait for the replacement to arrive!

Any tips on the process are appreciated . . .

gatorparrots · May 30, 2003, 08:47 AM

Originally posted by Doncom:
Any tips on the process are appreciated . . .

http://www.macworld.com/2001/02/bc/13insidepb/
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/powerbook...d_upgrade.html

RevEvs · Jun 2, 2003, 10:14 AM

Well finally did it, and with 2 screws leftover. No major problems, as long as you are patient then it should go fine. Installing OS X now, will see how much of a speed increase its made..

revs

radarbob · Jun 2, 2003, 12:39 PM

Googlegear.com also has great prices on the IBM/Hitachi Travelstar drives, including the 40GNX for $130.5 shipped and the 80GB 80GN for $285 shipped.

Good price! I bought a 40GNX for $155 or so from 4allmemory.com - and their price was better than others I saw.

I'm thinking of upgrading the 10gb hard drive in my iBook to something larger... i've seen a 30gb drive that is 5400rpm - the original drive is 4200rpm. Would this make a noticable and worthwhile improvement to disk operations in OS X? Just wondering if it's worth the extra money really...

If you must choose, I say get a higher capacity driver over a faster spinning one...

Look how fast drive capacity demands are increasing. The original iBook has a 3.2GB drive. Once I put in my new 40GB drive I had 3x that much used in the first week.

And IMHO, I acknowledge others on this thread who attest that higher RPM drives, specifically 4200 vs. 5400 rpm, make a noticable difference. But, I wonder if disk size is also a significant factor. OS X uses virtual memory. If OS "classic" is any guide, the OS took drive space == the your virtual memory setting + a bit more. BUT OS X manages all that itself - I can see where being able to give OS X all the drive space it wants would help.

Finally maximizing physical RAM definitely helps as well.

RevEvs · Jun 3, 2003, 11:10 AM

well things seem a lot snapier with this new drive (IBM 40GNX) - battery seems to have suffered a lot tho - then again havent done any big tests. Seem to remember it being 2hrs 30 on a full charge, now its on 1hr 30..

then again its thrashing the HD at the moment. will do more tests and see...

revs

RevEvs · Jun 3, 2003, 11:31 AM

ah, its hovering around 2hrs now, so it hasnt been effected that much by the new HD

revs

smijolovic · Jun 7, 2003, 11:29 AM

I would wait for the 7200s. They will fly. The 2.5 form factor hard drives consume about 10-15W of power, so battery life won't be an issue...you would lose a few minutes at worst.

This upgrade would give the ibook close to a 50% increase in speed. I just got my 800, and I will upgrade to a 7200RPM hard drive as soon as they become available.