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treebark7182 · Jan 30, 2007, 12:54 PM

I was interested in upgrading the hard disk on my 12'' powerbook. I was wondering what sort of connection its compatible with. ATA-6 ?? SATA?? I have no clue. Also i was wondering if i should get a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive. Right now i have the 60gb slow drive and I feel like its a real bottleneck for my laptop. any help would be great.
>thanks!!

rjt1000 · Jan 30, 2007, 02:21 PM

The PowerBooks use ATA hard drives, not SATA. Either 5400 or 7200 rpm will work. The 5400 rpm models will generally be cheaper, run cooler and use less battery power. The 7200 rpm models would give you marginally better performance. Check out the ifixit guide to be sure you feel comfortable with doing the upgrade yourself, or find a Mac certified tech to do it for you.

BTW, how much RAM do you have? If your RAM is limited, you may want to max the RAM first, which usually gives more performance boost than increasing the hard drive speed.

treebark7182 · Jan 30, 2007, 02:30 PM

i found that guide a while ago and i feel pretty comfortable. I have made my own computers before but i have never taken apart a laptop before. 1 have 1.25gb of ram in my laptop. Im thinking of going for the hitachi 5k160 160gb 5400 rpm drive.

rjt1000 · 07:58 AM

Originally Posted by treebark7182

Im thinking of going for the hitachi 5k160 160gb 5400 rpm drive.

Newegg customer reviews of the drive you are considering

FWIW I also have the 12 inch G4 1.33 PB with OEM 60gb Toshiba drive and 1.25 gb RAM. Although it performs well overall, I have noticed that when there is a bottleneck it is generally the CPU. Before upgrading the hard drive, you may want to use activity monitor or menu meters to keep track of the percentage CPU usage during your bottlenecks. If it is generally occurring when CPU usage is at 100%, you may want to reconsider whether the hard drive upgrade will really help with the bottlenecks.

If you do go for the hard drive upgrade, it would be informative if you could do a couple of before and after tests using a clone of the same system you have on the 60 gb drive on the 160 gb. Perhaps time to boot would be a good test, or some of the tasks that seem to be a bottleneck. If you do that, I would appreciate your posting the results here.

Enjoy

treebark7182 · Feb 8, 2007, 07:07 AM

I installed the HD and wow what a difference. Everything seems to have a little more pep. applications open faster. Boots much quicker, and i can finally store some movies etc. After i put in everything i still had 100gb free. Very happy thus far. Instalation was really pretty easy if you stay organized. I sugged the pbfixit web guides if you're going to do anything like this.