[Daniel Bayer]

Mmmm, yeah, I really DID need to replace my ti 1ghz's stock Toshiba 4200 rpm with a new Hitachi 7200 RPM!

WoW! What a difference!!!

It bumped my XBench score from a puny 85.3 to a nice 95.4..to me that is just the start of the gains in speed. I have to say it....but EVERYTHING is much "Snappier" and faster.

Example:

A 204 mb photoshop tiff file opened with the toshiba in about 15.5 seconds. The same file now opens in just over 6 seconds.

Startups and shut downs used to take forever and and are now really fast. Almost shut down right away and only 1:14 from chime to head park and full screen.

....This is with the drive over half full...:-)

So I now have the old drive in a Trans-Intel Oxford 911 firewire enclosure and it is a great clone drive.

Here are the XBench Read / Write times with 28.86 GB free on a 55.88 GB drive:

Disk Test 80.61
Sequential 85.64
Uncached Write 90.84 36.16 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 74.41 29.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 113.19 17.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.50 30.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 76.13
Uncached Write 64.62 0.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 81.77 18.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.11 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 79.03 16.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]


Here's an old score on the Toshiba with nearly 40 GB free:

Disk Test 53.57
Sequential 62.87
Uncached Write 50.37 21.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 56.04 22.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 142.55 22.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 52.89 22.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 46.66
Uncached Write 36.57 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 47.47 10.89 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 50.72 0.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.84 11.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Overall a nice improvement with a minimal change in battery life and a bit louder drive.

......now off to the Apple store in Denver to buy the 17inch 1.33 to put it in...:-).

Speed is EVERYTHING!!

[h00ligan]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR POSTING THIS

i was contemplating whether it would be worth it to get the drive, jc that bumps you up into the new pb range.. NICE!

I will HAVE to get one now.. you do realize what you have done to me right?just need my amex billing period to roll and i am ON IT. THANKS THANKS

can you post your whole xbench results please, or link me to the comparo page?

CHEERS

[h00ligan]

i saw your results.. nice.. not quite albook speed, but pretty damn close!

[bmhome1]

Ditto on the thanks! First and only review from user actually owning one instead of the usual blather about cost, etc. Ordering one next week (of course the price will drop another 30% the week after).

[nobitacu]

Very nice indeed.

Ming

[Daniel Bayer]

The link to the full bench test is on XBench at this link:

http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc1=34458

I will probably have a better idea on average battery usage in a few days.

FYI, the drive is around $289. from trans-intel.

This has been such a big improvment in operational speed, it makes me wonder if I shouldn't just hold off on buying the new 17, 133.

Tough call though for I could use the larger screen and my ti is in perfect condition to sell right now....and the 17 133ghz with this drive would be quite the productivity package.

Thanks all,

db

P.S. The hardest part of the drive swap is those little grommets.

[iDORK]

Originally posted by Daniel Bayer:
Mmmm, yeah, I really DID need to replace my ti 1ghz's stock Toshiba 4200 rpm with a new Hitachi 7200 RPM!

WoW! What a difference!!!

It bumped my XBench score from a puny 85.3 to a nice 95.4..to me that is just the start of the gains in speed. I have to say it....but EVERYTHING is much "Snappier" and faster.

Example:

A 204 mb photoshop tiff file opened with the toshiba in about 15.5 seconds. The same file now opens in just over 6 seconds.

Startups and shut downs used to take forever and and are now really fast. Almost shut down right away and only 1:14 from chime to head park and full screen.

....This is with the drive over half full...:-)

So I now have the old drive in a Trans-Intel Oxford 911 firewire enclosure and it is a great clone drive.

Here are the XBench Read / Write times with 28.86 GB free on a 55.88 GB drive:

Disk Test 80.61
Sequential 85.64
Uncached Write 90.84 36.16 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 74.41 29.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 113.19 17.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.50 30.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 76.13
Uncached Write 64.62 0.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 81.77 18.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.11 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 79.03 16.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]


Here's an old score on the Toshiba with nearly 40 GB free:

Disk Test 53.57
Sequential 62.87
Uncached Write 50.37 21.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 56.04 22.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 142.55 22.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 52.89 22.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 46.66
Uncached Write 36.57 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 47.47 10.89 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 50.72 0.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.84 11.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Overall a nice improvement with a minimal change in battery life and a bit louder drive.

......now off to the Apple store in Denver to buy the 17inch 1.33 to put it in...:-).

Speed is EVERYTHING!!

Hey!

Thanks for the post, looks like the drive hauls. How much louder is the drive? Is it noticeably louder?

Thanks for your input!

[scott brown]

scores on the 5400rpm in my new 17incher, originally posted in another thread. looks like it beats the 7200

Disk Test 81.57
Sequential 98.95
Uncached Write 102.92 40.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 88.97 34.73 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 136.47 21.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.37 33.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 69.38
Uncached Write 60.95 0.87 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 70.31 15.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 69.18 0.46 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 79.57 16.38 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[videian28]

how much did it affect your battery time?

[ctishue21]

Don't forget that your new 17" is ATA100. The tibook is ATA66? I forget. I'm sure the 7200rpm in the 17" would go even higher than those scores.

On that note, I'm picking up a stock 17" 1.33 from the Apple Store today. I'm probably going to replace the drive down the road myself. The 5400rpm would end up costing me $175 extra because of the BTO fee and having to ship to state with a higher tax rate than the state the Apple Store resides in.

[Daniel Bayer]

I would have to agree with the ATA 66 versus the ATA 100 thing too.

The drive is about twice as loud as my stock Toshiba which is pretty darn quiet.

The low hum is a moderate bit louder but there is a higher pitch noise from the rpm's that makes up the majority of the noise increase.

I have a question for someone who might know the awnser.

Would a drive post a better score if it were only filled with apps and not the 22GB of music and photo files it has?

Not that I am complaining by any stretch, I can be more than happy with how much faster this drive is.

So far, there is no difference in Battery usage.

I will have to do one of my super-duper photoshop with itunes sessions to see how it really does.

[CrackedButter]

I am so going to do this...in about 3 years when the powerbook warranty runs out!

[Daniel Bayer]

Warranty??

As far as I know, it does not void your warranty to swap drives. There are even instructions in your manual.

You should be able to do this for security reasons if you were to ship it over a long distance.

Not only that, this is my second drive swap ( I did one on my first ti400 ) it is really easy if your are careful and concise. Took me about an hour including using Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer and place 27GB of data, apps and OS on the new drive.

If I get the new 17 inch, it will be wierd to swap drives before even using the thing.

.......still thinking about getting it and poking around for invoices outstanding.

db

[amazing]

The HD in the Ti was user installable. The HD in the current crop of aluminum PB FW800 are NOT user installable. If you install it yourself, you risk voiding the applecare. You could have an Apple Service Provider (ASP) install it, but Apple's position is unclear--your applecare for the rest of the computer may still be OK, but they assuredly won't support the HD. When I asked a tech at the Apple Store about having an ASP install the drive, his response was "Apple doesn't support that" and he wouldn't clarify that statement.

In the past this meant that you had to put the original HD back in before they'd look at it--namely, you'd have to pay the ASP to put it back in. If anybody can clarify whether this is still the case, I'd welcome your comments!

[doublep]

I have the exact same setup as you do...

...but notice slower test results.

Any ideas why?

Disk Test 75.88
Sequential 78.15
Uncached Write 78.31 31.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 67.89 26.50 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 116.07 18.37 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 66.36 26.81 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 73.74
Uncached Write 63.40 0.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 77.89 17.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 81.54 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.81 15.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[neutrino23]

Originally posted by doublep:
I have the exact same setup as you do...

...but notice slower test results.

Any ideas why?...

This is one of my major puzzles about computers. In principle, things work like clockwork and they are all the same so all computers of the same model type should turn in the same scores. Yet, if you look at Xbench there is a fairly wide spread in reported scores.

I recall seeing some drive test results which indicated that drives of the same model turned in different results for the same test.

There are a couple of guesses as to why this happens. There could be different firmware in the drives. Nothing makes the mfr report that in the model number. Also, there could be slight calibration differences between different drives. Or the head drive mechanism is exhibiting a little jitter.

Suppose that all the specs are the same but one drive has a little trouble finding a sector. It would be forced to wait one extra revolution to find the data.

Also, it is curious that drives with essentially the same specs (seek time, spindle speed, areal density, etc.) from different makers perform quite differently.

[h00ligan]

what was running

how much ram

quality of ram

fragmentation of dir structure - run diskwarrior lately?

run it under another user aco****

running things like aped?

etc etc..

there are a lot of variable..


I HATE TAKING the back of a Tibook, it never seems to fit quite perfectly back on..

BAH

[Daniel Bayer]

Yeah, pretty subjective stuff.

What it really boils down to is how it works for you moment by moment, day by day.

Pretty decent battery life thus far.

Been on the net for nearly two hours and there is still 43% left.

[GoldenHammer]

What would be the power consumption and noise level with the 7200 rpm HDD?

Can it be installed on the PBG4 (the Ti mode)?

Thanks.

[amazing]

Any laptop HD can be freely and easily installed in the Titanium--but not in the AlBooks. That was one of the great attractions of the Titanium, because a new HD can easily enhance the speed and usablity of an older Titanium. When you pop a larger and faster HD in, while putting the old HD in a portable firewire case, your Titanium has a new lease on life.

Sadly enough, that's not the case with the AlBooks. So many problems with the new notebooks are very hard to diagnose, and once an HD is popped in, Apple could very easily weasel out of the AppleCare. For example: Your logic board goes kaput? Ah, but you put an "unsupported HD" in, that's what did it. Etc. If they can tell that you've popped the case, perhaps you've let slip in talking to them that you've done this, and there's no record in their database that the work was done by an approved ASP, or you have no receipt for the work done, they have denied AppleCare in the past.

[dialo]

The biggest annoyance I run into is drives spinning up whenever I want to see a contextual menu. If one of my 7200 RPM firewire drives is connected, those take a while, too.

So my question: is there any significant improvement in contexutal menus?

[mrmister]

"Don't forget that your new 17" is ATA100. The tibook is ATA66?"

It is, but no notebook HD even gets near the throughput of ATA66 at this point--so changing to ATA100 is going to make no difference whatsoever in speed.

This is a common misconception here.

[GoldenHammer]

Would that 7200 rpm speed gives some difference even with the ATA66 interface? What should I expect to have if I change the 4200 rpm to the 7200 rpm drive on my Tibook?

It seems a nice arrangement to acquire the 7200 rpm drive as the main unit and the original one as backup drive with a Firewire case.

Originally posted by mrmister:
"Don't forget that your new 17" is ATA100. The tibook is ATA66?"

It is, but no notebook HD even gets near the throughput of ATA66 at this point--so changing to ATA100 is going to make no difference whatsoever in speed.

This is a common misconception here.

[jewing80]

Last week I updated my stock 1 GHz Ti to a 7200 rpm Hitachi and 1 gig of RAM. It really does give the notebook a new lease on life. I had grown tired of waiting a couple seconds every time I opened a finder window, or watching as individual images loaded in Safari.

I had initially thought the RAM would be sufficient however the difference was fairly minimal for normal everyday uses. My Xbench went from 83 point something to 84.0. Even while playing Medal of Honor and UT2003 I didn't notice much of a difference.

The hard drive was a completely different story. It gave my system a much, okay I will use the ubiquitous speed catch phase, "snappier" feel. My Xbench score jumped over 10 points to around 95, all games would play maxed out with absolutely no slow down. A good test of gaming is the slight slowdown when a game like Medal of Honor auto saves. With my new setup the game doesn't pause at all, prior to upgrading everything would stop for nearly a second. Also boot up and shutdown is noticeably quicker, what used to seem like minutes now takes seconds.

I had fully expected to purchase a 15 AL with in the next month, but for now I see the upgrades I've made sufficient to last me through the next revision. I'd love to have an illuminated keyboard, and USB 2.0 other than that I see no other huge advantage for my internet/office/gaming needs. The way I see it, the graphics card is strong, the processor is sufficient, the case is durable and the upgradability is inexpensive and easy, I really couldn't ask for anything more.

For anyone who owns a Ti and is looking for a less expensive alternative to the new AL for under $500 you can make you current notebook feel like a brand new machine!

Jake

[GoldenHammer]

Thanks for the update for a life case, I have the exact Tibook, I am going to follow your arrangement.

GH

Originally posted by jewing80:
Last week I updated my stock 1 GHz Ti to a 7200 rpm Hitachi and 1 gig of RAM. It really does give the notebook a new lease on life. I had grown tired of waiting a couple seconds every time I opened a finder window, or watching as individual images loaded in Safari.

I had initially thought the RAM would be sufficient however the difference was fairly minimal for normal everyday uses. My Xbench went from 83 point something to 84.0. Even while playing Medal of Honor and UT2003 I didn't notice much of a difference.

The hard drive was a completely different story. It gave my system a much, okay I will use the ubiquitous speed catch phase, "snappier" feel. My Xbench score jumped over 10 points to around 95, all games would play maxed out with absolutely no slow down. A good test of gaming is the slight slowdown when a game like Medal of Honor auto saves. With my new setup the game doesn't pause at all, prior to upgrading everything would stop for nearly a second. Also boot up and shutdown is noticeably quicker, what used to seem like minutes now takes seconds.

I had fully expected to purchase a 15 AL with in the next month, but for now I see the upgrades I've made sufficient to last me through the next revision. I'd love to have an illuminated keyboard, and USB 2.0 other than that I see no other huge advantage for my internet/office/gaming needs. The way I see it, the graphics card is strong, the processor is sufficient, the case is durable and the upgradability is inexpensive and easy, I really couldn't ask for anything more.

For anyone who owns a Ti and is looking for a less expensive alternative to the new AL for under $500 you can make you current notebook feel like a brand new machine!

Jake

[hldan]

Originally posted by Daniel Bayer:
Mmmm, yeah, I really DID need to replace my ti 1ghz's stock Toshiba 4200 rpm with a new Hitachi 7200 RPM!

WoW! What a difference!!!

It bumped my XBench score from a puny 85.3 to a nice 95.4..to me that is just the start of the gains in speed. I have to say it....but EVERYTHING is much "Snappier" and faster.

Example:

A 204 mb photoshop tiff file opened with the toshiba in about 15.5 seconds. The same file now opens in just over 6 seconds.

Startups and shut downs used to take forever and and are now really fast. Almost shut down right away and only 1:14 from chime to head park and full screen.

....This is with the drive over half full...:-)

Wow that is so cool!, Is it possible to upgrade the hard drive in the 17"PB? I have the Rev A model and I was thinking about a 7200RPM drive. I know an authorized Apple tech would have to do it but does anyone know if it's possible and is so then how much would it cost for the parts and labor?


So I now have the old drive in a Trans-Intel Oxford 911 firewire enclosure and it is a great clone drive.

Here are the XBench Read / Write times with 28.86 GB free on a 55.88 GB drive:

Disk Test 80.61
Sequential 85.64
Uncached Write 90.84 36.16 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 74.41 29.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 113.19 17.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.50 30.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 76.13
Uncached Write 64.62 0.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 81.77 18.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.11 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 79.03 16.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]


Here's an old score on the Toshiba with nearly 40 GB free:

Disk Test 53.57
Sequential 62.87
Uncached Write 50.37 21.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 56.04 22.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 142.55 22.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 52.89 22.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 46.66
Uncached Write 36.57 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 47.47 10.89 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 50.72 0.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.84 11.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Overall a nice improvement with a minimal change in battery life and a bit louder drive.

......now off to the Apple store in Denver to buy the 17inch 1.33 to put it in...:-).

Speed is EVERYTHING!!

[slimmy]

Noise? Can anyone report on this? It's the only consideration holding me back.

Slim