Add new life to an old laptop

For my birthday this year, I decided that I needed to upgrade the hard drive in my PowerBook G4/667 that I've had since 2001... At one time, this was the "high-end" machine, so it came bundled with the AirPort wireless card and 512Mb of RAM, along with a 30Gb drive... That was a pretty decent size at the time, but as I've expanded my usage of iTunes and iPhoto, and development tools, etc. the 27Gb of formatted disk space just isn't enough any more...

I had a budget of $200 to work with, and wanted to get an external drive case as well as the drive. I wanted to pick out the case first, to see how much I could spend on the drive. I shopped for price ranges on http://www.PriceWatch.com first, to get a feel for what things should cost. Then I went to http://www.NewEgg.com, one of my favorite online stores, to see how their prices compared. They were close to the lowest prices on PriceWatch, but I was much more comfortable dealing with a vendor that I've had a good track record with in the past.

At NewEgg, I found a nice aluminum Macally drive case for 2.5" drives, with both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a), that was about $36. That would leave me a little over $160 for the drive, which should be enough for decent drive... In fact, it was enough for a Toshiba 100Gb, 5400rpm drive with 16Mb of cache. This drive is not only three times the capacity of the original, but it should be noticably faster as well.

The total for both the drive and case, including FedEx Express Saver 3-day shipping, was less than a dollar over my $200 budget. I placed my order on Sunday night, and everything was delivered on Wednesday afternoon. After using "SuperDuper!" (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper) to copy the contents of the original drive to the new drive, temporarily mounted in the external case, I was ready to swap the drives. Don't panic, I have a Retrospect backup of the contents, too, just in case...

Using a "take-apart" diagram from http://www.pbfixit.com, I was able to take off the lower panel of the PowerBook, remove and replace the drive, and reassemble in less than half an hour. The only tool needed was a T-8 Torx driver, to remove 8 screws from the bottom of the case, and four screws for the drive mounts. The take-apart diagram includes an organizer layout page to help keep each size screw sorted out.

A few minutes later I had installed the old 30Gb drive into the external drive case, and was ready to go. The Macally PHR-250cc case is durable aluminum, and easy to install. It has room for any 2.5" drive up to 9.5mm tall. There are two FireWire ports to allow "dasy-chaining" devices together, and can be powered directly from the FireWire or USB connection. There is also a USB 1.1 or 2.0 port, as well as a 5v power input if needed. The case came with both FireWire and USB cables, and also has a USB power cable so that the drive can be powered through a second USB connection if needed. It even came with a soft leather-like sleeve for extra protection. Because of the small size, and no need for an extra power adapter, this external drive is very easy to take along in my computer bag.

After confirming that everything on the new drive was working properly, I reformated the old drive as an MS-DOS volume using Disk Utility from my PowerBook. While this has some drawbacks for using with the Mac, such as slightly less performance, and possible complications with long file names or invalid characters in names, it offers lots of flexibility in transferring data with other platforms. I've found that transfering zip, stuffit or tar archives is the safest way to move things... This lets me transfer documents and other files between my Macs and Linux/FreeBSD machines at home, and my Windows laptop from work.

I have noticed that the PowerBook feels faster now, with the new drive, although I don't have a good way to actually measure that. The old drive in the external case will be very convenient. I could have gotten a smaller drive for less money, but I wanted to maximize that amount of stuff that I can carry with me when I travel... Overall, I'm very pleased with my update.