[chris_h]

so, my brother's cube's harddrive has been making a funny whiring noise... assuming i end up replacing it for him, anything i should know about buying a drive?

any recommendations? any size restriction being in that little space?
anything to avoid?

thanks

[michaelb]

The cube takes pretty much any standard 3.5 drive. Mine's had a Western Digital, Quantum, and now an IBM 60GXP which is a 60 GB 7200 rpm 40 MB/sec sustained drive. No probs at all.

Many people like to look for nice quiet drives for Cubes, such as Barracudas.

Whatever you use, the inch thick lucite tends to deaden the sound anyway. I have mine on a rubber mat which helps too.

Installing it is slightly fiddly the first time you do it:
- first you do the Back to the Future bit lifting the cube innards from its shell,
- then you need a Torx 8 driver to remove 3 screens from the heatsink,
- then left the IDE cable plug from the drive, and slide the drive out,
- then finally remove two Torx 10 screws holding a special mounting slider to the drive itself.

There's a useful Apple .mov showing the process, but I've lost the URL. It should be linked in the Knowledge Base somewhere.

To put the drive back you reverse the process. (If you're like me, you'll stop several times to marvel at the work of art that is the engineering that went into the cube interior! I'm looking forward to comparing it to the evolutionary flat panel iMac - surely a thing to behold.)

[Michael T. Doyle]

Michaelb means three "screws" from the heatsink. Note that one of the screws seems like you won't be able to get to it but you can, just put the screwdriver at an angle. Be careful. Taking out the power cable from the drive is a real bear. Go gently.

[Sword of Orion]

What about driver software? Do you use Apple Drive Setup, or a 3rd party product like FWB?

[saru boy]

Originally posted by Sword of Orion:
<STRONG>What about driver software? Do you use Apple Drive Setup, or a 3rd party product like FWB?</STRONG>

I would use the Apple drive setup since you know that the Apple drivers will be supported in future OS releases.

[saru boy]

Originally posted by chris_h:
<STRONG>so, my brother's cube's harddrive has been making a funny whiring noise... assuming i end up replacing it for him, anything i should know about buying a drive?

any recommendations? any size restriction being in that little space?
anything to avoid?

thanks</STRONG>

One thing to remember is that if you are replacing it with a Western Digital, you have to change the jumper settings from single (the usual factory setting for WDs) to master. The reason being is that the hard drive shares the same ATA bus as the DVD or CDRW internal (which is set to slave), and therefore must be set to master. Otherwise, you'll get a flashing ? folder icon and neither the hard drive nor the optical will work.