I'm bummed, iBook HD broke.

R

Rabid Yellow Dog

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 21, 2003
Messages
153
After 2 years of constant use the HD on my 700mhz G3 14 inch iBook went kaputt. Boots off cds fine but cant even erase the hd. Apple tech guy said it would be ~$300 to put a bigger, working HD in it, and more to upgrade the wimpy 128 mb of ram. I hurts me deeply to think of spending over $300 on a 2 year old computer. What would you guys do: fix or buy a new one? If the latter, please suggest a replacement, mac or pc doesn't matter, just has to be relatively cheap :D .
 
Rabid Yellow Dog said:
After 2 years of constant use the HD on my 700mhz G3 14 inch iBook went kaputt. Boots off cds fine but cant even erase the hd. Apple tech guy said it would be ~$300 to put a bigger, working HD in it, and more to upgrade the wimpy 128 mb of ram. I hurts me deeply to think of spending over $300 on a 2 year old computer. What would you guys do: fix or buy a new one? If the latter, please suggest a replacement, mac or pc doesn't matter, just has to be relatively cheap :D .
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Hit newegg. Find the cheapest 2.5" hard drive you can. Get some ram from newegg as well, but it must be micron memory - not generic. do it yourself - way cheaper, and you get the joy of taking a computer apart!
 
i googled how to replace white ibook hard drives....SO MANY GODDAMN SCREWS :eek: :mad: since 700 mhz seems to be fine for my tasks, i guess ill suck it up and upgrade
 
i have the service manuals here somewhere, PM me and i'll send them over.
Mods: kill this post if that's illegal. i don't know how legal it is - apple doesn't sell their service manuals.
 
this is embarrassing, but im new to the pm thing, what is the pm supposed to include?
excuse my ignorance, i've never had to do this before.
 
Rabid Yellow Dog said:
oh and the only 2.5 inch hard drive newegg lists are scsi, which i dont think ibooks use
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Macs laptops haven't used internal SCSI hard drives since my Powerbook 520 (also 540 models). The largest 2.5" SCSI drive I could ever find was 1gb and that was well over 300 bucks. For what it's worth, I may be wrong that my model was the last to have SCSI hard drives but I'm pretty sure it was around that time (1994).

Furthermore, I think I can safely say that there aren't any PC laptops that take SCSI drives either. You must be looking in the wrong category because Newegg has a glut of 2.5" hard drives (41 IDE hard drives, to be exact) with prices starting at a mere $63 bucks + shipping.

Here's the link to the category:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=list&catalog=380&DEPA=0

Enjoy!
 
i see what i did, i went to the 2.5 inch part of the regular hard drive section instead of going directly to the notebook hard drive section.

here are the products that look good to me:
Replacement Hard Drive
Extra Ram

and finally, does anyone know of a way that I can determine decisively that it is hd failure and not something else? i dont want to waste my money.
 
I would recommend a 4200 RPM notebook drive for an ibook. the ibook is based around low power consumption, and anything that sucks up power will suck up battery life much faster than if it were any other kind of notebook...
 
Methodical said:
I would recommend a 4200 RPM notebook drive for an ibook. the ibook is based around low power consumption, and anything that sucks up power will suck up battery life much faster than if it were any other kind of notebook...
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I disagree

I have a 60GB 5400RPM Hitachi in my IBook 700 12inch and the battery life was not affected
 
Cache and rotational speed are pretty different things. Basically, in order of performance preference, you want rotational speed and if you can't have that, you take cache. 5400rpm with 16mb cache will spank whatever drive you had in your iBook before (I'd imagine you had a 20gb 4200rpm HD, at best) but 7200rpm will do you one better. Something you want to consider is the amount of heat a faster hard drive may generate. And I'm led to believe that iBooks do not provide great circulation for the hard drive. So, that's stuff to remember.

-Mike
 
the heat from a 7200 RPM drive will be minimal on a laptop drive as they are a lot smaller and usually just a single platter spinning so less power required and heat dissapated...my personal preference would be to get as much storage as I could afford...had a 20 gig in my old iBook and it went WAY to fast..have a 60 gig in my new iBook and am using almost half of it so given the choice of a very fast lower capacity drive vs a little slower but higher capacity drive I would take capacity over speed
 
And I've had good luck with Mushkin memory in my PowerBook. Not sure what type the iBook requires though.

B
 
Rabid Yellow Dog said:
OK, let's have a vote.

A. 7200 rpm 8 mb
B. 5400 rpm 16 mb

both are 40 gb
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i would go for A, with the faster rotation speed your laptop should definately feel faster and more responsive. my friend has a 5400rpm drive in his laptop and it just annoys me how long it takes everything to load =p
 
This page has benchmarks for a 10k Raptor vs a 16 meg Maxtor. Look at the single built-in test scores. The Maxtor is faster in just about every test, when on the built-in SATA.

Compare that to this. The biggest gain is 4200 to 5400. Going to 7200RPM gives a much smaller gain. Logically, a 16 meg 5400RPM would be the best option, judging from these tests.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
This page has benchmarks for a 10k Raptor vs a 16 meg Maxtor. Look at the single built-in test scores. The Maxtor is faster in just about every test, when on the built-in SATA.

Compare that to this. The biggest gain is 4200 to 5400. Going to 7200RPM gives a much smaller gain. Logically, a 16 meg 5400RPM would be the best option, judging from these tests.
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That's what I needed! Thank you! 5400 it is.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
This page has benchmarks for a 10k Raptor vs a 16 meg Maxtor. Look at the single built-in test scores. The Maxtor is faster in just about every test, when on the built-in SATA.

Compare that to this. The biggest gain is 4200 to 5400. Going to 7200RPM gives a much smaller gain. Logically, a 16 meg 5400RPM would be the best option, judging from these tests.
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i dont get your logic..

the first page you linked with the benchmark between the 10k 8meg raptor vs a 16meg 7200rpm maxtor. both of these are sata hdds for the desktop

the second link you compared a 5400 rpm hdd to a 4200 rpm hdd which holds some relevence to the topic of this thread but i think this one is better http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar60GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html it compares these laptop hard disk drives:

Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200 RPM/8MB cache
Hitachi Travelstar 80GN 80GB 4200 RPM/8MB cache
Toshiba MK4019GAX 40GB 5400 RPM/16MB cache
IBM Travelstar 40GNX 5400 RPM/8MB cache
OEM IBM Travelstar 40GB 4200 RPM/2MB cache drive that shipped in this PowerBook G4

still there is no 40GB 7200rpm 8mb hitachi travelstar but it has more relevence to the decision he has to make.
 
heero884 said:
i dont get your logic..
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If a 10k RPM SATA drive with 8 megs of cache is slower than a 7200 RPM SATA drive with 16 megs of RAM, and a 7200 RPM laptop drive is only marginally faster than a 5400 RPM laptop drive, both with 8 megs of cache, it is only logical to assume that a 5400 RPM laptop drive with 16 megs of cache would be faster than the 7200 RPM one.

The test you linked to on xlr8 is better in some ways, and worse in others. It's a direct comparison, which is better, but it only contains file duplication tests (Xbench et al are best ignored), which gives a rather one-sided view on the performance.
 
If you don't want to try the hd upgrade yourself then you could always buy a hd and have a service center install it. Compusa charges 30 bucks instore for a hd install. Depending on how you feel about installing the drive you may want to make them do it as they are apple certified. You may want to call around to see how much apple shops want to. Most want like 50 to 60 bucks which may be worth your money if there is not a compusa in your area.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
If a 10k RPM SATA drive with 8 megs of cache is slower than a 7200 RPM SATA drive with 16 megs of RAM, and a 7200 RPM laptop drive is only marginally faster than a 5400 RPM laptop drive, both with 8 megs of cache, it is only logical to assume that a 5400 RPM laptop drive with 16 megs of cache would be faster than the 7200 RPM one.

The test you linked to on xlr8 is better in some ways, and worse in others. It's a direct comparison, which is better, but it only contains file duplication tests (Xbench et al are best ignored), which gives a rather one-sided view on the performance.
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you said look at the built in tests for the raptor vs maxtor comparisons. why? if you look at the pci performance the raptor is faster than the maxtor. could it be the built in sata controller in the g5 is responsible for a performance hit? http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=267&devID_1=265&devCnt=2 with the pci controller the raptor is faster than the maxtor so i would not come to the conclusion that the 5400rpm 16mb laptop hdd is faster than the 7200rpm 8mb cache hdd

if you look at the link i provided and compare the 5400rpm 8mb hdd vs the 5400rpm 16mb hdd graphs the performance is nearly identical. you say the benchmarks are flawed because they involve file copying and read/write tests but isnt that what the hdd suppose to do?
 
ermmm i thought apple computers used Crucial brand ram....
 
heero884 said:
you said look at the built in tests for the raptor vs maxtor comparisons. why? if you look at the pci performance the raptor is faster than the maxtor. could it be the built in sata controller in the g5 is responsible for a performance hit? http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=267&devID_1=265&devCnt=2 with the pci controller the raptor is faster than the maxtor so i would not come to the conclusion that the 5400rpm 16mb laptop hdd is faster than the 7200rpm 8mb cache hdd
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I don't think the controller in the PowerBook is much slower or faster than the one in the PowerMac, so that would be the most relevant comparison.

heero884 said:
if you look at the link i provided and compare the 5400rpm 8mb hdd vs the 5400rpm 16mb hdd graphs the performance is nearly identical. you say the benchmarks are flawed because they involve file copying and read/write tests but isnt that what the hdd suppose to do?
Click to expand...

Duplicating a single, or many for that matter, files will show the performance for that. It doesn't really tell you how long it will take to fire up Photoshop, though.
 
swatbat said:
If you don't want to try the hd upgrade yourself then you could always buy a hd and have a service center install it.
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Exactly what I plan on doing. :)

elite.mafia said:
ermmm i thought apple computers used Crucial brand ram....
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Since my original posts I decided to use Crucial ram because its guaranteed.

Between the arguements of BMR and heero, I think heero's is more in tune with what i need. Since this computer is for storing files (movies, songs, and such), the read time for a 100 mb file, although onesided, is exactly the type of thing this computer will be doing. 7200 it is....i guess :rolleyes:
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
I don't think the controller in the PowerBook is much slower or faster than the one in the PowerMac, so that would be the most relevant comparison.
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theres no difference between the g5 sata controller and the powerbook ata controller?..

im not saying one is better than the other, theres just some anomalies that i feel should be mentioned, thats all.
 
heero884 said:
i would go for A, with the faster rotation speed your laptop should definately feel faster and more responsive. my friend has a 5400rpm drive in his laptop and it just annoys me how long it takes everything to load =p
Click to expand...

I'd have to agree with this. 7200rpm drive would be my choice.

Ax
 
Rabid Yellow Dog said:
Between the arguements of BMR and heero, I think heero's is more in tune with what i need. Since this computer is for storing files (movies, songs, and such), the read time for a 100 mb file, although onesided, is exactly the type of thing this computer will be doing. 7200 it is....i guess :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Okay then, that makes it a whole lot easier! ;)

heero884 said:
theres no difference between the g5 sata controller and the powerbook ata controller?..

im not saying one is better than the other, theres just some anomalies that i feel should be mentioned, thats all.
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Of course there are differences. In the test you posted, weren't they in external FW cases? I'm sure that matters, too.

Anyway, since I haven't read a direct comparison other than the one you posted, and that one was slightly lacking, I guess we can't really say much more about this. :p
 
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