[satyagrahanism]

My hard drive whines. See post "Boycott Apple . . ."

Has anyone replaced their hard drive with an IBM Travelstar 40GNX Disk Drive? I'm looking at the 20 gigger. It's 5400 rpm though - will it suck my battery?

If you do have a Travelstar hard drive - is it hush hush quiet? Like can't hear it at all?

Does your comp get hotter with this new drive? Overheating problems?

Lastly, was it easy to install? I'm pretty unsaavy, so I might take it in somewhere, but if I can save some bucks, I will.

Dee

[satyagrahanism]

forgot to also ask:

so how did you transfer all the info on your hard drive to your new hard drive? do you just connect the other hard drive in, format it, and then transfer all the info over? then take out your old hard drive and stick in your new one?

(i know you can't just "plug into a drive with some firewire cable, but i'm planning to get an enclosure, so maybe i can stick it in that first - drag things over - then take out my old drive and replace it with my new one? will that work?)

also, people are noting on these boards that the gn is quieter than the gnx. is the gn literally noiseless? and is the gnx that much faster than the gn? at this point, my main issue is quietness.

people are talking about clacking from hard drives. i hear it when i'm using pcs. apples dont do that - not to my knowledge. so do these ibm travelstars do that "clacking" sometimes?

that clackign would freak me out

dee

[iDaver]

My Ti 667 came with the 30GB which I replaced with a 48GB. Both are Travelstar drives. The 30GB was completely silent except when accessing (clicking). The 48 has a just slightly noticeable spinning noise, but nothing like the whining you've described. Not sure if this is the answer you're looking for but I'd say the whining is unusual and a sign of a defective drive.

[satyagrahanism]

what? it came with ibm travelstars? reallllyy?

wow.

and what do you mean by accessing? everytime you pull up something from the hard drive? isn't that all the time when you work on a comp?

what what model of travelstars do you have? gn or gnx?

thanks
dee

[iDaver]

By accessing, I mean when the drive is working. If I'm just sitting here reading web pages, the disk spins but it's not doing anything. As soon as I switch to a new page and it's loaded to/from the cache, I hear the slight clicking noise, typical of a hard drive "accessing."

My replacement drive is the 48GH. The original, while not marked GN, GNX or anything, is model IC25N030ATCS04-0 4200RPM.

As to transferring all my stuff, at the same time I got the new drive, I got a firewire enclosure for the old one from Other World for about $90. That and the new drive totalled about $300, less than the cost of most portable drives. The enclosure is powered by the Firewire bus so it's way easy to use!

[iDaver]

Originally posted by satyagrahanism:


(i know you can't just "plug into a drive with some firewire cable, but i'm planning to get an enclosure, so maybe i can stick it in that first - drag things over - then take out my old drive and replace it with my new one? will that work?)

What I did, was to put the new drive in the PowerBook, load the OS, put the old drive in the new external enclosure and then transfer my stuff from the external to the internal. It was painless. Note that OS X needs to be INSTALLED on a new drive. It can't just be shuffled over from an old one.

[anly]

I have a travelstar 20GB drive I bought a year ago. It is quiet, but still noticible when the laptop is on. Also, it makes these clickings sound every minute, I read somewhere that this was intened, so that the head would not stay at the same position for a extended period of time.

Cheers.

[satyagrahanism]

geez - it clicks that often?

that would seem it could get kind of annoying as well.

at least with my drive, you can't hear the whine if you've got some soft background noise (which usually comes within the day)

when i think of "clicking" noises, i think of the sound pcs make when they're trying to access something. that noise sucks. ive always appreciated how desktop macs dont make that noise.

so all the travelstars you guys have come across make that clicking noise huh? so no whine, but clicks each time you access the drive.

hmmm....
dee

[iDaver]

I didn't mean to imply that this access "clicking" is the least bit annoying. I can only hear it if the room is totally silent.

[seanyepez]

As I replied in your other post, I highly recommend the quieter Fujitsu drives or IBM TravelStar 40GN.