Currently I have a 5400 rpm 100 gb hard drive in my powerbook. I am considering an upgrade to 7200 rpm. Is it worth it, would it make that much of a difference for system performance? I have heard that it makes a world of difference, that and upgrading the ram, but I just wanted to see what experience and opinions you guys have about it. Thanks!

 

If you're accessing lots of big files, I'd say it's worth it.
I have an 80gb and 1gb of ram..Let me know how you like it

 

I don't think whether or not it's a Mac is relevant. Those upgrades on any system will give a noticable boost in performance.

 

upgrade the RAM first, it will make a huge difference - upgrading the HDD from 5400 to 7200 is not worth it.

 

I already have a gig ram, and my ram meter on the menu bar shows about 360mb is used. I am accessing files a lot, I have 13 gigs of music and lots of video files, plus thousands of pictures in iphoto. So do you think its worth it to upgrade the hard drive? I just don't want to upgrade and get disappointed, it looks like a big job to open the powerbook.

 

id just get an external hdd.

The apple people charge a TON to upgrade....better bring some lube if u plan on having the genius do it.

7200 rpm and atleast 8mb of cache is good

 

I plan on doing it myself, so all I would be paying for is the actual drive. Also, the point of the upgrade is not for more space (I have over 400gb worth of external space ) it is for the higher rpm's.

 

ehhh unless you get a good deal youre not gonna notice a huge increase in performance.

it will also moderately effect youre battery life

i have an 80gb 7200rpm and 768mb of ram in my ibook...i have a few hundred pics and 5000 songs...my ibook still doenst skip a beat even if im multitasking the heck out of it.

now ifi i were doing some more intensive programs...yea i would need more power

 

I figure you're talking about a G4? And you're running Tiger? With a gig of RAM, on a G4, with Tiger you're not going to see much of a difference by kicking up the drive speed.

The additional drive speed will _generally_ give you better (faster) access time, which will be a big deal if you're accessing a lot of files randomly in a short period of time. But, it sounds like you're more about accessing a few file files across a longer period (music, videos). For that, Tiger (Panther as well) does a GREAT job of setting up a preload cache in that gig of RAM. The cache will be kept loaded such that the player app won't have to hit disk.

In short, a 7200 RPM drive will get you to a file quicker (we're only talking a difference of maybe 1-2ms) but once the file's been found, the drive speed won't help you.

 

I agree with midiwall, the faster access time will not be noticable with 10.3 or 10.4. No worrys on the difficulty of changing out the drives either, once the bottom screws are out slightly lift and push forward at the same time, the drive is right there. For help on how both www.powerbooktech.com and www.pbfixit.com have very detailed instructions with pics.

 

I wanted to kick back into this thread a bit...

As fate would have it, the original 6gig drive in my Pismo started flaking out. I hit up ebay and found a 40gig for $55. The original 6gig was an IBM Travelstar, 4200RPM, 66mbps transfer rate, 12ms acces time - your basic laptop drive from 5+ years ago. The new one is a Fujitsu, 5400RPM, 100mbps transfer rate, 12ms access time.

I just put it in and I wanna amend what I said above... I'm still okay with what I said about the rotational speed, but if the drive you're moving to has a higher xfer rate, then by all means go for it. The difference on this machine is very noticable.

 

Thanks for jumping back in

I will eventually get to it, the seagate drive I am looking at is extremely quiet and has a higher transfer rate than the seagate drive thats in there now. Just putting it off a little because I had to buy stuff for school. I will probably upgrade the ram first anyways because I seem to run out of it fast, especially when running VPC.

 

Ahhh... another VPC user. Yeah, it's a pig. Feed it all the RAM you can.

Ya' know.. Depending on what you're using VPC for, you may be able to find a decent used Intel laptop on Ebay for cheap I ended up finding one for about $100 that fit my needs just fine. In the end, it actually runs better than VPC did on this Pismo.

 

Not to hijack the thread, but what do you need VPC for? I do run it on my machine infrequently and only because MS Access is not ported to OS X. Pretty much everything else is and works well. VPC is too much of a hog for PC gaming, just curious.

 

Using it for programs my school uses, and for programs at work that are windows only

 

A lot of good info in this thread already that I agree with, just wanted to add another webpage reference-the guy over here at http://barefeats.com/ does a lot of testing on stuff like you guys are talking about. And these guys specialize in Powerbook upgrades: http://www.mcetech.com/
Good stuff

 

Well I decided to bite the bullet and just buy a new 7200 rpm hard drive (hey if it didn't give the expected results, I would just buy an enclosure for it.) The results are not dramatic, but there is definitely a difference, especially in iPhoto. If I had to do it again, I would. Plus, now I have an external 100gb pocket drive. The drive is a Seagate ST910021A, from newegg . Total price was the lowest I have found anywhere except ebay, $190 + shipping.

 

I PERSONALLY took apart my ibook to replace the logic board (fancy term for motherboard) and it was a bit of a pain. Don't delve into your laptop if you don't have to. It is possible to switch them out, but just move for RAM first; it will be much easier.