I'm a little out of the loop on hard drives these days, but I'd like to upgrade the drive in my PowerBook. Speed is the key requirement. 6 months ago the Hitachi 7k60 series where about the fastest laptop drives out there (and I think the only 7200 rpm laptop drives?). Are these still the fastest available drives? Is there something faster/cheaper on the immediate horizon? Any other thoughts on these drives?

Thanks,
-Mike

60 gig is still the largest 7200 drive for laptops. Though soon, a 100gb 5400 drive should be out, and that will probably be what I upgrade my Powerbook to, from an 80gb 4200 drive.

Some benchmarks of different drives in a Powerbook are here.

Nothing fast and new anyhow. I've been waiting for rumored 7200 80 gig drives since I bought my Powerbook a year ago. I'm finally giving up and will just get the 100 gig 5400. I figure a speed bump and space bump will make me happy enough.

I'll ask Mike over at XLR8 if he plans on doing an update to the PB drive comparison.

I'd be concerned with a 7200rpm drive in the PB if it generates more heat as do the faster desktop models. The PB already gets flame-hot as it is. And I don't do anything outside the finder on it right now - though I suppose mpeg4 decoding gets the CPU going pretty good sometimes. But I notice the incredible heat even just using a browser and connected to the wireless network.

I've got the same 4200rpm 80GB drive in my machine, 1.5GHz with 512MB of RAM and the 128MB Radeon Mobility 9700.

I dropped it off at the shop today. Not that impressed with the shop. Not when I found out they don't do any component-level repair work (ie. soldering). Though maybe I should be glad about this on a warranty issue. It means they'll just swap out whole boards as they're available from Apple.

Incidentally, a new version of our graphics control panel, ATI Displays, will be released next week which now supports all OEM ATI installations. This means easy access to per-application settings for things like FSAA and Anisotropic filtering - great if you do any gaming.

Bruno

Apple ships the Powerbook with a 5400 option, and when mine was first out, 7200 was also an option.

Most of the heat in a Powerbook is in the rear area towards the middle due to the CPU and GPU being near there. The hard drive is up front, under the trackpad.