I'm thinking of doing this with a Fujitsu (MHT2060AH) 60GB 5400RPM 8MB Cache HD. There is an Apple certified place in the city that is willing to do this for me for about $250 CAD (~$204 USD). Do you think this mod is worth it or not? Should I just be happy with the OEM? I'm not really wanting more HD space, I just want a faster drive with a bigger cache. The only downside if they do this, is -if- the HD fails they will charge more their service fee to remove it and reinstall the old one.

You are having a tech do it for you to keep your warrentee? If not, save some bucks and do it
yourself. You will see a difference in speed and drain you battery faster. How much ram do
you have? I would upgrade to the maximum before you do the HD. Check some Apple oriented
websites for some speed tests. The closet you will get on comparison is looking at the
difference between Powerbooks. Try http://www.xlr8yourmac.com or http://www.barefeats.com. Hope
that helps.
-maestro

I did it my self and i dont really notice much of a speed diffrence ( I put a 80GB 5400rpm 8MB Cache Western Digital in) just loads more space, mines a bit noiser due to the higher rpm and the fan in the ibook spins up a bit, never used to notice it before, but then I havnt been running it on a stand like I do normally. I don't think its going to give you a huge speed boost, unless your do a lot of disk intensive stuff, I'd say throw more RAM at it first. I also belive that if you do it yourself you don't void the warranty but they wont cover any damage you do, or the new component, however I would have thought that once they worked out that you opened the case their going to blaim eveything on you anyway. If you can think of any benchmarks I could run on my ibook to try and work out if it acctually faster I could give them a go if you want.

Thanks for the quick reply,

I was going to go with the Apple Certified tech because of Warranty issues. I have the extended Applecare plan. After reading what the both of you have to say, I might not go with it after all. I plan to use it for web developing, photoshop, etc. I have a desktop at home for the real stuff. I was just wondering if anyone thought it was a worthwhile upgrade.

Not for the speed increase no, I would say don't bother. As has been mentioned before RAM will help with what your doing far more than a faster Hard Disc, plus you can do it yourself without killing the warranty!

burtman wrote:


Yup, I already haev 768MB inside. I won't go with the HD upgrade mainly because of the noise and battery consumption mentioned above.

don't think the hard disc actually makes a huge amount of diffrence to power to be honest, i picked one that was meant to be ultra low power and i dont think ive lost much at all in the way of battey life, i still get 4 hours plus from it.