[troymurray]

I thought this was an interesting and quick read if your interested in the RPM of the hard drive in your PowerBook.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard39.html

[RooneyX]

When you see the battery life drop fast the 7200rpm isn't worth it unless you keep the Powerbook plugged in a lot. 5400 is very good until power requirements come down.

[sbc]

A self-install of a new HDD voids the warranty? This can not be realistic; that is insane!

[rag on a muffin]

whats the delta battery life on these drives?

[MacOSR]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
When you see the battery life drop fast the 7200rpm isn't worth it unless you keep the Powerbook plugged in a lot. 5400 is very good until power requirements come down.

??????????????? I get between 3 and 4.25 hours on my 17" 1.3 with a 7200 rpm drive. I MAYBE lost 10 minutes of time at the most from the 4200 rpm drive.

The performance gain you get with the 7200 rpm is well worth it. This SHOULD be an option directly from Apple.

[bcaslis]

I've tried both the Hitachi E7k60 and the 7k60 in a 17" 1.33GHz machine. My opinions are:

Pros:
The drive didn't really use a noticeable amount more power or more heat than the standard 4200 or optional 5400 drives. For those worrying don't go by specs but real world usage and in that case I really can't tell the difference.

Neutral:
Performance. Sorry but although Bare Feats does show accurate numbers, unless you spend all your time copying and manipulating gigabyte sized files you can't see the difference if you have a gig or more of memory in your machine. Truly I couldn't any real difference in normal usage. In boot times I could only see about 1 second difference in boot times. It's just not worth it. I'm sure others will disagree but I can't see what others are so worked up about. It's faster but without a stopwatch you will never see it.

Cons:
Noise and vibration. The E7k60 I got is the "enhanced" version and it was the worst laptop drive I've seen in years. It had a serious buzzing vibration that went through the whole machine. I pulled it after three days. It could be that the drive was bad, but I'll never risk using this drive again. The 7k60 was the normal 7200 drive and it did not have the bad vibration. It made a little more noise than the stock drive, but it also had a very high pitched noise that after a few days was unacceptable in quiet environments at night. If it had a significant performance advantage I might have lived with it but given the lack of performance I was seeing I couldn't see living it with it.

These are just my opinions but I went through alot of effort trying these drives and I was severly disappointed. I'm sure those recommending them mean well, but I would advise anyone thinking of these to avoid them for now. Once a 100GB 7200rpm drive comes out I'll take a look, but I'm not impressed for now.

[bmhome1]

My 72k Hitachi 60GB in my 900/1GB Pismo has been the QUIETEST drive of all 42k and 54k drives ever run in it by a wide margin, and it has been that way since last spring when installed. Totally vibration and battery performance hit free, too. And the speed of handling any size files is amazingly faster.

[rag on a muffin]

Originally posted by MacOSR:
??????????????? I get between 3 and 4.25 hours on my 17" 1.3 with a 7200 rpm drive. I MAYBE lost 10 minutes of time at the most from the 4200 rpm drive.

The performance gain you get with the 7200 rpm is well worth it. This SHOULD be an option directly from Apple.

oh no! i will loose 10 minutes of battery life!