Photonic Torpedoes

In my effort to extend the life of my PowerBook for as long as possible, I recently went on a bout of upgrading, which on this particular machine means maxing out the RAM and replacing the hard drive. Those are essentially the only significantly replaceable parts on the G4 models (aside from the SuperDrive).

I had actually thought about upgrading the drive a couple years ago but learned in the course of my research that such a procedure would void the warranty on the machine, so I let it go. However, since such constraints no longer bind me, I figured I might as well go for it. If I screwed something up, I’m on my own to fix it anyway. Resolved, my next issue was to find a compatible drive that wouldn’t break the bank.

After some brief research, I was surprised that laptop drives really aren’t that expensive these days, even for the higher performance models. I eventually settled on a 100GB, 7,200 RPM Seagate Momentus (ST910021A), which is 20GB larger and has nearly twice the RPMs as the stock drive from my machine. As a bonus, I found a new one for $70 on eBay which is about 50% the retail price.

Going in, the prospect of deconstructing the PowerBook G4 seemed daunting. Whereas my previous Pismo G3 model is noted for its relatively simple disassembling procedure, the G4 is equally noted for being a pain in the ass to work with. Fortunately, I found some online help from the friendly blogger at meanderingpassage.com, who had already once performed the procedure I was about to undertake. His notes led me to some comprehensive take-apart instructions provided by ifixit.com.

All in all, I found the process to be fairly straightforward and painless. I drew a grid and some labels on a sheet of paper to keep track of where a the various screws came from. The only minor snag was the clasps above the SuperDrive (see meanderingpassage for a description). And I raise my eyebrow at whatever engineering thoughts went into that clasp decision. It by far took the longest amount of time in the entire operation. Plus, in my enthusiasm for finally having conquered it, I nearly yanked the keyboard ribbon from the motherboard.

I’ll offer one piece of advice though. The ifixit instructions call for removing the keyboard entirely from the machine. I found that to be unnecessary. Resting it against the display proved sufficient (as in the photo above).

While the mechanical work took sightly longer than an hour, the complete procedure totaled in the 7-8 hour range. It was 3-4 hours to copy ~65GB of my data from the existing drive to a bootable disk image over Firewire, an hour to do the work, then another 2-3 hours to copy all the data to the new drive. The performance improvement was evident immediately.

Once the PowerBook had been snapped back together, I had two worrying incidents that turned out to be benign. First, after a successful boot up, the computer wouldn’t play any sound: no music, system alerts, or volume controls. Fortunately, a simple restart sorted that out. I was concerned that I had broken a speaker cable or damaged the sound card, but I’m glad that wasn’t the case.

The other concern was heat and noise. Those 7,200 RPMs have the possibility of being noisier and more power consuming than the 4,200 RPM drive it replaced. However, in standard operation, I can barely notice the difference. I was taken aback at first boot up though. At the time, the disk seemed awfully loud and the ‘Book’s fans kept spinning up as I was working. Of course, I thought it could be that the new drive was hotter and louder, but it turned out to just be Mac OS X’s Spotlight re-indexing the volume. Overall, the Seagate has a fuller, hollower sound, but it’s not much louder.

Add to the maxed-out RAM that I’ve installed and the performance boost is noticeably faster with the new drive. I didn’t think to run a benchmark on the machine before the upgrades. Geekbench provides a baseline, but since Geekbench only measures processor and memory performance, the gain from the new drive isn’t reflected in the results. Still, 2GB of memory provides ~6% more processing power than the stock 512MB. The real booster here though is not having to page as much memory onto the hard drive, and when necessary, the drive can process it faster.

Baseline:

Results:

If you’re terribly interested, here are my Geekbench results.