# 17" PowerBook Hard Drive upgrade



## ibglowin (Sep 10, 2002)

Not a whole lot of Mac heads on this board but I wanted to let anyone with a 17" Ti Book that I upgraded my 60GB HD this weekend to a new 80 GB 5400 RPM Hitiachi Travelstar drive from ZipZoomFly.com ($198).

So what you say? Well anyone who has ever seen one of the new Powerbooks has to be impressed by their thinness! This thing is/was well engineered to say the least. Its 3 lbs less and about an inch thinner than a comparable 17" HP or similar PC laptop.

My main thrust to the fast upgrade on my less than 1 year old PowerBook (yep, I voided the warranty!) was the fact that even though 60 GB sounds like a lot, by the time you put your digital photos, MP3's, and then start working with large video files to make 2 hour DVD's off the 921 you end up with only 5-7 GB left of space which they say is on the ragged edge of space needed to render your video files effieciently. Thus the push to upgrade!

The 80 GB drives came on the market about a month after I purchased my new Powerbook (of course) AND they are now making 5400 RPM laptop drives (vs 4200 RPM) so you get an immediate increase in speed. Speed test run before and after installing one of these new drives show around a 30% increase in speed and since upgrading the processor is not an option, the only thing you can do is add memory and or a bigger/faster drive.

Apple does NOT list a PDF on how to do upgrade the drive on the 17" Powerbook for good reason. To get to the drive you have around 25 screws to remove, several thin cables AND the entire top of the Powerbook must be lifted off to reach the drive whereas you can reach the drive on earlier models by removing the rear case (around 8 screws) and a much easier install by comparision.

I was able to find a website from another Mac user in Japan with loads of good photos! Unfortuneatley its all in Japanese! He has a link that will translate the procedure to English but its done through Altavista and if youve ever translated anything on one of these web based translators they have a lot of room for improvement, almost histerical translations!

Here is the link if anyone is interested:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?url=http://www.kodawarisan.com&lp=ja_en

Let me just say that this upgrade is NOT for the weak of heart! If your not comfortable around computers and taking things apart don't try this one for sure! It took me just under an hour to dissassemble, install the new drive and put it all back together. Everything went perfect! The new drive is incredibly fast and I can easily notice the speed increase when booting up and accessing data.

Now for the icing on the cake! One of the other reasons to upgrade was so I could take the old 60GB drive and place it into my old 400Mghz Powerbook G3 (Pismo) and utilize this guy as a media server attached to my Stereo and 60" Sony. Much bigger screen display than an Ipod! (Now to rip all 300 of my CD's)

I installed the 60GB drive in the G3 Powerbook in less than 10 minutes (true piece of cake) and thought what the heck, I wonder what would happen if I try and boot this thing up? Would you believe I pressed the startup button and it booted right up! Were talking a totally different set of hardware here folks, even a different processor! It seems just as happy as can be.

The integration between hardware and software on an Apple is truely amazing.

Anyway I have PC's as well and use both and love both (for different reasons) but I thought I would pass this info along just in case anyone was interested.


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## MarkA (Mar 23, 2002)

Hehe, you're lucky - I've got an iBook G4 with a 40GB hard drive. No video editing for me (well, actually I have, just becuase iMovie is so cool - but I used another computer's hard drive (as a network drive). It turned out quite well.


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## ibglowin (Sep 10, 2002)

Yea,

iLife is sweeeetttt!

Once again the integration is unbelievable.



MarkA said:


> No video editing for me (well, actually I have, just becuase iMovie is so cool - but I used another computer's hard drive (as a network drive). It turned out quite well.


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