My 500 MHz PowerBook G4 has always felt a little pokey—quite natural given its 4200 rpm 20 GB hard drive and 100MHz FSB. I’ve looked into upgrading the hard drive (the bus is impossible to upgrade), but never met with any luck or hope.
Until today, that is! Derrick Story or O’Reilly details his adventures in upgrade land with a bit more advanced of a PBG4 than I have, but more alike than different. The cost is reasonable, doubling the hard drive space and upping the rpm to 5400 cinches the deal for me.
A comment after the article links to the specific page at Other World Computing that Derrick visited. For $219.99, I can bring my space up to 60 GB while keeping the speed the same and getting a 16MB data buffer. OH YEAH!
I wouldn’t even glance at the 7200 rpm IBM drive since it would drain battery something awful. 5400 rpm seems like the sweet spot.
Steve suggests that I might even consider buying an external FireWire drive chassis for the old hard drive. This is getting better. It’d be like a whole new PowerBook for just a couple hundred dollars. Oh wait. That’s a couple hundred dollars more than I have available for upgrading the computer. Hmmm.