PowerBook upgrade!

[Diginique]

I'm looking forward to upgrade my iBook to a PowerBook 12". I'd like to know if anyone has tried installing a 7200rpm HD into the PowerBook? If yes, any known problems? I understand heat and battery would be the issue but beside those? Would the perfomance of the PowerBook working with the Digi002R, thus, improve? Any inputs would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks!!!

[tele_player]

shouldn't be any problem, except for the warranty.

[Diginique]

Cool! However, has anyone tried this and has since enjoyed the performance compared to the original ones? Well, I just wanna make sure that it's worth the upgrade. I'd greatly appreciate if you could even include the details of the test, like, no. of plug-ins have increased, faster processing...

Thanks a million!!!

[cwhite771]

Are you planning on recording to this internal drive? If so, yes there would be some performance improvement over the stock 5400, however recording to the internal drive is not recommended. You should always record to a secondary drive for best performance and to avoid potential problems/issues. Invest in a good external FW drive instead.
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c

[Bhennies]

Get the 15" PB (with FW800) and buy a FW800 external drive as a boot disk. I did this and it works wonders- so much faster than the stock drive! FW800 is the same speed bandwidth as an internal IDE drive. I think it would be pretty stupid to void your entire Apple warranty to install an internal, personally. Even if something like your screen goes up- Apple will point to the hard drive and say that the failure was your fault for installing it.

[tele_player]

One workaround for the warranty risk would be to reinstall the original drive if it needs to go in for significant warranty work. Carefully done, replacing the drive should be undetectable.

One of the reasons I got a powerbook was to get away from having boxes and cables around just to use a computer. I'm toying with the idea of installing a 7200 rpm drive in my new PowerBOok - I've never been one to shy away from opening up something I've paid for.

Get the 15" PB (with FW800) and buy a FW800 external drive as a boot disk. I did this and it works wonders- so much faster than the stock drive! FW800 is the same speed bandwidth as an internal IDE drive. I think it would be pretty stupid to void your entire Apple warranty to install an internal, personally. Even if something like your screen goes up- Apple will point to the hard drive and say that the failure was your fault for installing it.

[Diginique]

Alright! Guys, thanks for the advise! Really appreciate it! I'd like to highlight one point which I, myself, had encountered. I used to have this 1394a ext. hdd for recording with my iBook 700. Initially, I was told that using the ext. hdd would be recommended 'cos it'll increase performance, but to my surprise, it did not. After much research, I realize(and was also told) using the internal drive would be the best option for any processing. Any comments on that? I'm only interested in the performance with regards to PTs......

Thanks!!!

[cwhite771]

As far as I know the biggest performance increase you should see by replacing your internal (system) drive with a faster one would be when opening/saving files, or if you're running an application that uses the HD for cache/swap space/virtual memory. If you have adequate RAM installed for what you're doing, the disk shouldn't come into play too much.

In regards to PT and performance with a laptop, a good external drive should give you fewer problems (buffer errors, disk can't keep up type stuff) and even increase your track count over just using a single internal. The reason it is suggested that you record to an external (or secondary drive for those with desktop machines) is that it completely separates PT disk functions such as playback and recording tracks from the activity associated with your system/internal drive. If your system needs to access the internal drive for some reason (which it may do quite frequently depending on what you have going on) while recording/playing back tracks it won't interfere with those tracks if they are written to/accessed from an external.

The only thing that will increase your plugin count is processing power-- which means a faster processor. A hard drive won't increase your processing power. Though, as mentioned earlier, if you're using swap space due to a lack of RAM it may improve your performance, but not nearly as much as adding more RAM would.

Also, the quality of the drive and the external enclosure will make a big difference in the performance you see-- not just any drive/enclosure will do. The FW enclosure must have the Oxford chipset and a drive with a larger disk cache will both make a difference. This may have been a factor in your previous experiment.
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c

[JFreak]

performance gain you get from 7200rpm hard drive is HUGE, but please, let a certified service personnel do it, because (other than titanium powerbooks) it is very hard work to change a hard drive in an apple laptop. changing it yourself voids the warranty.

of course, the performance boost is there only when the disk is accessed, but the 7200rpm hard drive inside enables recording into the internal drive also. no need to always carry the external firewire hard drive with you.

a 667mhz tibook began to feel like a 1ghz model after the 4200rpm -> 7200rpm drive exchange. amazing. i had to have the same drive in this 1.25 albook also try it, you'll just love it.

[Phydaux]

I purched a 7200 60 gig hard drive for my 17" lap top but ended up putting it in a firewire 800 Webie tech case as I couldn't be bothered pulling my lap top apart. I record directly onto the 4200 snail drive that comes standard and haven't encountered any problems at all. Interestingly enough I was bouncing down a couple of projects the other day about 28 tracks with lots of plugins and I finally receive the hard drive cannot keep up alert, so I transferred the file to my faster drive re booted and it didn't help at all. I don't think I wasted my money on the other drive and I'm sure it would speed things up a little if it were installed in my lap top but the standard drive really works quite well.

Powerbook 17" 1 GHz/1gb ram/ Mac OS 10.3.3 Digi 002/ Protools 6.4 /Reason/ Live/Cubase SX 2.2/ Meldoyne/ Waves 002 etc