Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / February 2007

Any 2.5" ATA drive from a reputable manufacturer should work fine.
barefeats.com, IIRC, has info on drive performance, and xlr8yourmac.com
has information for older machines as well.

I don't know if this is of any help, but I just had to replace the drive
of my PB:

The 3 year old Toshiba MK8025GAS 80GB in my PowerBook G4 15-inch FW800
broke last saturday. I was doing light www browsing when I got some
extra disk activity followed by the colored pizza of death.

I could not boot form another HD neither from a DVD, and the single user
boot stopped to I/O error related to the internal drive (I don't know
whether I could have bypassed it, anyone?)

Next morning, to my surprise, I could briefly boot from it and freshen
my 2 week old backup. Copying from the drive was progressively slower
and after a while I noticed that if I bumped and tilted the PB the copy
progressed for a while. Several bumps later I had copied a fresh backup
to an external FW drive. That backup seems valid, BTW.

Then I went to hunt for a new drive. For some strange reason I have had
a sweet spot towards IBM/Hitachi SCSI Ultrastars and ATA Deskstars (even
the 75GB Deskstar a.k.a. Deathstar is still doing fine for me after all
these years!).

But none of the local stores had Hitachi in stock and I couldn't wait
the few days the mail order would have taken. Besides the staff at one
store warned me that IBM is the worst brand HD they know...

They only had Western Digital and Samsung locally. Samsung products
(cell phone software support) have not been Mac-friendly so I have had
an aversion for that brand. But I knew even less about WD so I let the
store install a 120GB 5400 rpm Samsung HM120JC which they recommended.
None of the local stores had any 7200 rpm drives so I didn't need to
think about that.

If the PB had been any older, I would have installed it myself but I
have experience only from installing stuff to a desktop 8600 so I let
the store do the install to the laptop. Luckily I had the PDF service
manual for the PB so the PC-store could more easily do the install to
the Mac.

...so I chose the drive rather blindly but it has worked OK. It is as
quiet as the old Toshiba and disk access sounds are almost non-existent
(the Toshiba made somewhat disk access noise which was in a way a good
thing so the user knew something was happening!).

The ATA SMART Feature Set didn't seem to be listed for the Samsung, but
when booted from the drive its SMART status is listed as OK in the Disk
Utility. BTW, the old failed Toshiba's SMART status was also OK when it
was on its last leg!