[gkrykewy]

I just had a hard drive die on my fiance's Pismo (actually her second death in four years). First symptoms occurred while trying to upgrade it to 10.3 (resulted in a disk error, please try again message). After a VERY unpleasant with some successful booting, followed by the rhythmic click of death, I was able to get the drive to mount successfully on my iBook by using the powerbook as a firewire volume. This allowed me, thankfully, to retrieve all of the valuable data.

I then formatted the drive on the powerbook (through my iBook's disk utility) and attempted to install 10.3 on it fresh. The installation was interrupted midway by the rhythmic click of death, leading me to believe that this is a physical problem with the drive rather than a software/bad sector type issue. I type all this only for background and in case someone has any suggestions about saving the drive.

Anyway, I'm planning now on just buying a new HD, since they seem to be quite easy to replace in the Pismo, and installing it myself. Am I right in assuming that once I install the new drive, I can use the disk utility in my iBook (again) to initialize it or whatever and then install 10.3 fresh? Any tips on this?

Finally, I was looking for brands/actual drives that people would recommend both for reliability and speed. I found an article about a 40 GB Toshiba drive (K4019GAX) working quite well in a Pismo, so I'll go with that unless anyone has any better suggestions. Thanks in advance for your help.

[Dr.Michael]

I used a Hitachi travelstar with 5400 rpm in my Pismo. It worked great, very silent and made the Pismo experience FAST.

Consider the 7200 RPM model because its even faster and heat is no big issue on the Pismo.

Toshiba drives are silent but hitachis are way faster (see barefeats.com for test results).

[MarkusYamamoto]

Get the Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM drive.
Startup and file access is amazingly fast.
I just hope they make a 80GB or larger version of this 7200RPM drive soon.

This drive is able to play more tracks and even the G4 recommended demo tracks in Garage Band in a iBook G3 800 Combo!

[gkrykewy]

Thanks for the recommendations. I may go with the 5400 RPM 40 GB Hitachi. My only hesitation is that the current HD, which failed, is a Travelstar from 2001.

[Waragainstsleep]

Yeah heat isn't an issue with the Pismo.

Except the ones that melt HD cables or processors.

And the ones that catch fire.

[amazing]

Originally posted by gkrykewy:
Thanks for the recommendations. I may go with the 5400 RPM 40 GB Hitachi. My only hesitation is that the current HD, which failed, is a Travelstar from 2001.

Hey--maybe it's still under warranty? Do you have the receipt from 2001, because I believe it's a 3-year warranty...

Beyond that, go to pricegrabber.com and do a search for the best price on whatever HD you're considering.

[[APi]TheMan]

I got a Travelstar GN (GX?) 30 gig about a year ago for my Pismo and, while it works fine, it clicks. Although it's worked fine since day one, it has also clicked (caused by frequently parking drive heads). I fix this by using APMTunerX to change the Automatic Power Management settings on my Pismo to not park the drive heads so often.

The drive I got was a 4200 rpm, and I wish I had gotten a 5400 to make the "Pismo experience" just that much faster (though the machine does have a 900mhz G3 PowerLogix upgrade in it).

[gkrykewy]

How would I go about getting warranty satisfaction on the existing drive? Would a credit card statement count as a receipt?

[gkrykewy]

Hey, thanks for the tip on the warranty! I'm getting it replaced free of charge!