[tonton]

Time to upgrade my puny 10GB HD. I almost took the plunge today and went for a 48GB Travelstar. But whew! 450 smackers doesn't fit too well with my budget.

I hear that the 48 gig drive is faster even than the 32 gig drive. I've also heard that it is quieter because it has liquid bearings.

Exactly how fast is it? Would it be even noticeable if I am running with a gigabyte of RAM? I use Photoshop with huge files, but I have enough RAM to handle most of them. I am usually conservative with my use of multiple layers.

I don't do video, and I don't have much plans to do any, other than iMovie when I finally get a DV camera. What else is so hard drive intensive that a slower drive can't handle it?

I don't have any problem with the noise from my stock 10 gig. Would the 30 gig Travelstar be noisier?

If not, I'm tempted to sacrifice speed for a smaller drive and a price cut of 50% compared to the 48. That savings will just about buy me an Airport card and another 512MB RAM module.

The other question (and this is the TiBook specific part, Tooki) is after I buy my drive, I will put the old one into a Firewire enclosure. Can I then boot from that drive over Firewire without having formatted the newly installed internal drive, or do I have to copy my system to the new drive first?

And what is the absolute smallest, coolest looking FW enclosure I can get that has one of the new bridge chips? Every 2.5" enclosure I see is unnecessarily big and ugly. Can't they make one that matches the Ti? Whatever enclosure I get, it absolutely MUST be thinner than my TiBook. What do other PowerBook users recommend?

[blot]

Compared to my original 20Gb Toshiba HD that came with my Ti, my 48Gb IBM is 20% faster in terms of write KB/s, 226% faster in read KB/s and 19% in terms of access in ms, based on FWB HDT benchtest.

How that will translate into real world performance for you, I have no idea. If the scratch disk is utilised, perhaps photoshop may be faster. One thing for sure is that when you finally save the file or retrieve it from the HD, it will be faster.

If $$ is the issue, weigh the pros and cons carefully based on your needs.

As for the ext fw casing, I got myself the Flex-HDD (transparent greyish-blue top half) 2 FW ports and 1 USB port Oxford911 from fwdepot.com. It was the smallest and thinnest (exactly 1in) that I could find at that time. The color is ok but I wished that the manufacturers had a transparent grey cover instead. There is another casing called ice something that looks way cool (can't remember from which site) but it is 1 1/4inch thick and does not offer a usb fw combo.

Hope this helps.

[Kenneth]

There is another casing called ice something that looks way cool (can't remember from which site) but it is 1 1/4inch thick and does not offer a usb fw combo.

I guess you are talking about this model, right? IceCube I know this page is written in Chinese, but basically it is a 3.5" enclosure, which used the new OXFW911 ATAPI to 1394 and TI TSB41LV03A chipset. It supports ATA33/66/100 and max. thru-put is 35MB/s. If you are looking for a 2.5" enclosure, this one should be better.


Hope this would help

Kenneth

[pcp_ip]

The IceCube in english: pro-mini drive. It's a cool looking case...

[zorn]

i own the pro mini drive (30 gig) and it rocks! great performance great price!

~ Mike

[tonton]

Thanks for the heads up on the Pro Mini drive. That thing is still a bit thick, but it looks better than most of the alternatives, and it sounds like performance is top-notch. Now I have to see if I can somehow get it in Hong Kong, because I can ship HK-Swiss for free through my company. I tried the Chinese site, but the domain seems to be dead .

I might ask a friend to go down to Sham Shui Po to see if they can find it there.

Meanwhile, I did my homework on the hard drive.

I hadn't realized that IBM released an updated version of their 30MB drive with the same larger cache and same fluid bearings as the 48 . Before buying, I checked the IBM site (the IBM site is excellent), found this info out, went to transint'l.com, and lo and behold it was the right drive.

It's only 4400 RPM, but for half the price, and since I don't do video (yet), I believe this is the right drive for me.

Okay, Tooki, I got my answers, you can move this to the Peripherals forum if you like!

[tonton]

fwdepot.com has the same enclosure, with inserts and an included cable for the same price as themacsmith.com, but boy, do they stick you for the shipping and sales tax! Is sales tax in California really over 10% now!? And why do they say shipping weight for the drive is "3 lbs." and surface mail is therefore $13? Must be some hefty packing! Needless to say, I won't be buying from fwdepot any time soon. But now my drive will arrive and I'll have no way to use it!

Update: Ordered from OWC. $120 + $5 shipping 2nd day air. Compare that to Trans Int'l's $130 + $13 shipping priority mail + $13 tax.

[ 09-10-2001: Message edited by: tonton ]

Originally posted by tonton:
<STRONG>fwdepot.com has the same enclosure, with inserts and an included cable for the same price as themacsmith.com, but boy, do they stick you for the shipping and sales tax! Is sales tax in California really over 10% now!? And why do they say shipping weight for the drive is "3 lbs." and surface mail is therefore $13? Must be some hefty packing! Needless to say, I won't be buying from fwdepot any time soon. But now my drive will arrive and I'll have no way to use it!

Update: Ordered from OWC. $120 + $5 shipping 2nd day air. Compare that to Trans Int'l's $130 + $13 shipping priority mail + $13 tax.

[ 09-10-2001: Message edited by: tonton ]</STRONG>

do you think maybe the fact that you are in Switzerland might affect shipping costs? UPS does not do 2nd day to international locations (except at a very high price) and USPS Priority does not ship internationally, only USPS GEMS, which again costs more....

[mrtew]

I got the 667 with the 48 gig and it's totally worth it. Soooooo nice to have vitually unlimited space and it is VERY quiet. I never realized how much noise the 10 gig in my 400Ti made until it was gone. Who knows how much faster it is really, but there's something about knowing that you've got the 'good' one. Go for it... it will put off updating again for an additional year and that's worth a LOT!

[mycatsnameis]

TonTon, make sure you check out the 40 gig Toshiba (also with fluid bearings that both OWC and Transintl sell. My 10 gig Toshiba was quieter when writing than my new 30 gig Travelstar (although the Travelstar is quiter when spinning).

I posted all kinds of links re the Travelstar in the Toshiba in another thread (just search for "toshiba fluid bearing" that oughta find it.

As for FW enclosures, I went through exactly the same scenario as you (10 =&gt; 30). I bought the enclosure that OWC was selling with the 911 with their 30 gig drives.

The problem I encountered was that, when I swapped in my 30 gig drive, it was not recognized as an "Apple" volume so I couldn't initialize it and install OS X. It also was rejected when I tried to initialize it in the FW enclosure. This was using Disk Utilities under OS 9.2.1.

After multiple swaps back and forth I discovered that the OSX Disk Utility _would_ recognize the drive in the enclosure and a wipe and clean install were fine.

What ever you do make sure you have the right tools for the job. For a Ti 550/667 you need a short handled Torx T8 head to get into the back cover and pop out the HD (a tricky operation, now I can do it my sleep but I digress). For the Ti 400.500 you need a sharp #1 Philips for the bottom plate screws and the Torx head (I think I read somewhere that it was a T9 for these but when I actually looked myself, the T8 was perfect).

The reason you need a short handle is that the screw driver has to fit into the battery bay in order to effectively bite on the HD screws. I found one of those mini rachets that I could stick a T8 bit into did the job perfectly. You'll need to find a good hardware store to find this stuff easily.

A note about the dreaded "rubber washers" that the HD screws thread through. Most online refs I read suggested that these were tricky to thread the screws through after replacing the HD b/c they would get dislodged out of alignment etc.

I found that you can attach all 4 screws (and washers) to the HD _before_ you swap it back in and then wiggle it into its place (the washers slide into their holes if you line it up right). I also found the Mac Manual that came with the Ti very helpful in the HD swap. It was the only place that showed how to bend the wall of the battery bay so that it would allow the HD in and out.


Good luck
catman

[Infinite Loop]

I have a 667 with 48gig drive and I can say it's faster. I would say around 15-20% faster overall. However, drive itself IS very noisy. Two of my colleagues got 667 also without any noise at all. So, I don't think it's a safe bet to think 48gig is quiet because it's got liquid bearings.

As for a enclosure, take a look at this.

http://www.pbzone.com/enclosure.shtml