Hard Drives

The hard drive in my Powerbook finally crashed and I'm looking to replace it. It's an Aluminum 15-inch, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to get a 7200rpm. My main question is the difference between ATA vs. Ultra ATA vs. SATA. I've read positive things about the Seagate Momentus SATA, but will this work in a Powerbook? This blurb says yes:
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/ata/40Gmomentus.php
but I've also read otherwise. Any thoughts or advice on this subject, or on hard drives in general, would be helpful.

I have a 12" powerbook and I wanted to more capacity so went for a Western Digital Scorpio 120gb drive. It only spins at 5400rpm but I've never had a problem with it - the fan runs quite a lot but it did that before the new drive as well - it is 4 years old!

WD Scorpio

I also installed it myself through instructions from ifixit

The connectors are different on ata/sata drives. I think the faster drives are usuallu found in desktops where ther are not suseptable to knocks etc. slower drives (4800 and 5400) usually in laptops because they can take punishment a little better.
So you will need to make sure the drive you buy has the same connectors besides the obvious - being a 2.5" laptop and not larger 3.5" drive

Thanks for the info. I'm guessing a SATA drive won't work in an aluminum powerbook. Can anyone clarify if this in generally the rule? So should I go with Ultra ATA over ATA? Where does PATA figure in?

You can get 7200 internal drives but the capacity is not as large as the 5400 drives. Take a look at this link on Amazon. The reviewers have actually installed the Seagate Momentus into their powerbooks.

I think I have it narrowed down to one of these two:

http://www.nextag.com/st910021a_-_rk/search-html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148130

Can anyone vouch that the 7200 is that much faster than the 5400 to make it worth the extra price and/or lower storage capacity? I can say I plan to do quite a bit of video editing. Is the 7200 too sensitive for a laptop?

To be honest if you're gonna be doing a fair bit of video editing you'll need an external hard drive anyway as you'll find it soons starts to fill up your hard drive.

walkingclock said:

I think I have it narrowed down to one of these two:

http://www.nextag.com/st910021a_-_rk/search-html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148130

Can anyone vouch that the 7200 is that much faster than the 5400 to make it worth the extra price and/or lower storage capacity? I can say I plan to do quite a bit of video editing. Is the 7200 too sensitive for a laptop?

Click to expand...

The 7200rpm notebooks drives are engineered to work in notebooks, so they should be fine. Whether there's a tangible difference in performance is another story.

My only experience relates to an older Dell Inspiron 8200 notebook (P4/2.4GHz, 1GB RAM) that came with a 5400rpm drive originally. When the first 7200rpm drive came out (Hitachi Travelstar 7K60), all of the websites I frequented commented about how much faster it was than a 5400rpm drive in the 8200, so I paid the then steep price of $200 for the drive. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed. I couldn't detect a performance difference.

Now, that was a few years ago (2003?) and 7200 rpm drives were bleeding edge at the time, so I don't know if they've been further refined over time. But in my opinion, unless you're really annoyed at the speed of your machine with the current 5400rpm drive, then save a few bucks and go with a 5400rpm drive.

Also, I wouldn't worry about reliability - especially if you buy a Seagate drive as they have 5-year warranties (the Hitachi drive in my old Inspiron 8200 is still going strong - sold it to a friend a few years ago).

To answer your other question - EIDE, ATA-100 and Ultra ATA are all terms that describe the older PATA (Parallel ATA) interface.

ATA-150, ATA-300 describes the performance of the newer SATA (serial ATA) interface.

I don't know the specifics of your machine, but if it's more than 3-4 few years old, it probably doesn't have SATA.

I think I'm definitely going with a 5400, with 120GB. It seems even the newest Macbook Pros have a 5400 drive, except for the 17", and only if you request a 7200. I'm also planning to add 1gb of Ram. Sounds good, no?

walkingclock said:

I think I'm definitely going with a 5400, with 120GB. It seems even the newest Macbook Pros have a 5400 drive, except for the 17", and only if you request a 7200. I'm also planning to add 1gb of Ram. Sounds good, no?

Click to expand...

That's exactly what I just bought: http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop...US5400.3-SATA8MBMOBILEHD-Internal Hard Drives

MacMall was a little more expensive than NewEgg, who I'd originally ordered it from (NewEgg was backordered), but expect to pay around $85 + shipping.

1GB of RAM will help tremendously. You'll see a much bigger performance increase by going to 1GB than upgrading your HDD.