Hard Drive Upgrade

[MagSafe]

Hi folks,

I've got a 12" iBook with a 30GB drive, providing Leopard can run on PowerPC chips I'll probably be sticking with my iBook for a little while longer until the Intel switch has firmly settled down and all universal binaries are out, and also saving me spending £1000+ on a new MacBook/MacBook Pro :p

As you can imagine with only 30GB of space to put all my work, software and iTunes music on things are getting a bit tight! I've got 12GB left at the moment so I'm alright for now, but am seriously thinking of upgrading to an 80GB or above drive, depending on the price.

I've built and repaired several Windows based machines before, but never any laptops of any kind. I was looking at the iFix guide as well as the comments on here and it just seems to involve to much risk, hascel and work to upgrade the hard drive myself.

So I was wondering, where exactly would I go, offline and online, and what options do I have to go about upgrading the hard drive? ... providing I live in the UK :)

Thanks for any advice given

[Wyatt]

Upgrading the iBook hard drive is a bitch (as you've seen from the iFixit guide). Most people just go for an external hard drive for non-essential files that they won't use while they're mobile, rather than upgrading. You can get a larger drive for much less money, and you don't have to deal with the hassle and risk of opening the notebook yourself.

[MagSafe]

Thanks for the reply,

I was thinking of buying an external drive and putting all my iTunes music onto it, but apart from that there isn't anything else i'd use it for ... and even then I'd still be short of space.

I'm really just looking for anyone that has upgraded there internal hard drive before and have done it via a third party service. I really don't want to risk installing one myself and I don't know of any alternatives that are available.

[Corey]

Ouch! 30GB. I have 60GB and I am constantly moving things off to my external drive. I'm waiting for the 2nd generation Pro to come out...

If you are planning on a computer upgrade soon, the external is the way to go since you will be able to keep the drive when you upgrade. If you don't feel up to swapping out the drive now, you won't feel up to swapping it back later so your upgrade expense will largely be $ down the toilet or in your case, the privies? You also won't recoup the cost of the installation at all when you resell.

If you need to carry everything with you there are a number of small travel drives that are not too large to carry around. Typically the smaller they are the more expensive they are and the slower they run. But again you get to keep it when you upgrade and since your computer is slow anyway you probably won't notice. You can also make your own using something like the $30 Coolmax HD-211-COMBO enclosure. Look on Amazon for it.

There is also a lot of junk in a typical Mac install that you can remove; fonts you don't use, utilities you rarely use, languages you don't use, etc. You can clean these off of your Mac onto a CD or an external drive to make some room.

Corey

[Brad]

...providing Leopard can run on PowerPC chips...
FYI, Apple has already stated that Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will run on PowerPC hardware and that they will continue supporting the PowerPC machines for the foreseeable future.