replacing the hard drive on my 15″ aluminum powerbook
So, last week the hard drive in my usually excellent Powerbook started making these ominous grinding and clunking noises. Not a good sign. Fortunately, I had enough warning to back everything up. I tried to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS. That helped for about two days, then it turned to toast and nothing worked at all.
After a suitable period of mourning and despair, I faced the inevitable fact that I’d need a replacement. A friend sent me a link to this review of the Seagate Momentus. It sounded great, until I found out that it’s a Serial ATA, and not compatible with my Powerbook. At least that was the word I received from the sages at macfixit.com.
Instead, I went for what I believe is the next best thing - the Hitachi Travelstar 7K100. This drive is pretty sweet, spins at 7200 RPM’s and has an 8 meg cache. After putting it in, I have to say there’s a noticeable improvement in performance, not to mention the extra 20 gigs from the old 80 gig Toshiba that came with the Powerbook.
I was a bit wary about the installation. I’ve taken this laptop apart before to install an external wireless antenna. That was fairly easy, although getting it back together just right was a bit of a pain. I’d never replaced a hard drive though, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.
Fortunately, a Google search came up with this excellent guide at ifixit.com. I printed out the PDF version, which includes step-by-step instructions, along with a handy screw guide, and a couple of pages in the back that included little circles where you can place your screws as you remove them. I didn’t actually know about that until I was done taking it apart, but I just kept the screws in groups according to where I’d removed them, and that made it pretty easy to put it all back together.
I think the whole replacement process only took an hour or so. No problem putting it back together, although one caveat I would give is to be careful of the little tab in the front, which is easily mishapen, as is the aluminum top case itself. Other than that, removing the ribbon cables for the trackpad and keyboard was a bit sketchy, but I’m still typing and tracking, so I guess it worked okay.
I hope these tips can perhaps help somebody else who’s in the same boat. I’ve never had a problem with Mac hardware before, but I think the Toshiba drives do go out from time to time. Maybe this post will help save some folks some time.