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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: bjmorgan on Feb 06, '04 11:33:20AM

Very cool. I, myself, am too paranoid about handling the innards of my laptop. I wonder though... Would this procedure work for the 12" PowerBook and would a faster hard drive fit in the small confines of my PowerBook? I'd LOVE to replace the clunky factory drive with a speedy 7200 rpm drive, especially for audio recording work.

Also, did you notice any increase in heat?



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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: panopticon on Feb 06, '04 01:50:39PM
The process to swap the hard drive out of the 12" Powerbook is incredibly complicated because everything is crammed so tightly in there, but here's how to do it. Personally, I'd bring it in somewhere and have it done instead of risking damaging my machine...

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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: avanham on Feb 06, '04 01:56:39PM

As I understand it, replacing the hard drive in a powerbook is way easier than what I had to do for my iBook because you can't easily remove the bottom cover of the ibook. Here are some instructions on the apple site for replacing the hard drive in a G4 PB
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=111925

I am 99.9% certain that the powerbook and ibook use the same hard drive. You can see what is available at devdepot.com, but basically you need a 2.5" hard drive that is no higher than 9.5mm. The Hitatchi Travelstar series definitely works in the iBook so I assume it will also work in the Powerbook.

I don't sit the computer on my lap, so I am not sure if it runs any hotter, but I doubt it.



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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: stetner on Feb 06, '04 09:12:08PM

I too would be very wary of this as a 7200 rpm drive is likely to throw much more heat than the iBook is designed to handle.



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re: 7200rpm drive
Authored by: NeutronMonk on Feb 07, '04 09:03:30AM
This is probably turning into what properly should be a forum thread... I'll still post a quick comment on the 7200rpm Hitachi drive. I've successfully installed this drive into a 550MHz Gigabit Ethernet G4 Tibook, and I love it. There are absolutely no heat issues, and the drive is virtually silent. While I haven't done any proper benchmarking, drive intensive tasks seem quite a bit faster than before, as should be expected. One caveat: again, although I didn't do any before/after benchmarking, it seems to me that I've lost some 10-20% of my battery life- while no big deal for me, for some it might be an issue. Here is a review of this drive, along with links to aritcles on how to install it.

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