[geeks] Macbook drive fun

[hike]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Apr 25, 2009, at 1:20 AM, William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>  I'm working on my macbook recently and realized the hard drive is
>> sounding a bit too loud. I began dumping as much as possible out to
>> dvd+r's as I can but...
>>
>> Today the Seagate 160gb drive ate it's bearings and let me know when
>> all of a sudden every application froze up :) That make's the third
>> dead hard drive for this beastie in the 2 years I've owned it... of
>> course, two of them had help dying with knocks off the table by my
>> son, but hey...
>>
>> I ran out to my favorite local hole in the wall that sells all kinds
>> of interesting components and found a new Hitachi 320gb (or 298 real
>> GBs)  drive. $80 later I'm home and rebuilding. Shuffling DVD's is
>> even more annoying than shuffling floppies was ...
>>
>> Anyone have any experience with this drive? The model number in system
>> profiler is HTS543232L9A300 I'm just wondering if I can hope for a bit
>> better than the about 1 year life span I got out of the Seagate. I
>> shouldn't be too harsh about the Seagate - I got it cheap as an HP
>> pull off of ebay so I may well be lucky it survived this long ;O
>>
>
> How old is it?
>
> I've never had a problem with seagate notebook drives, this sounds like the
> eBay seller saw this coming...
>
> Retail versions of that drive come with 3-5 year warrantees, I'd expect the
> drive to last 3 yrs.
>
> Heat? Is this a high RPM drive in a low-RPM laptop?
>
> Lionel
>
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The MacBook*s that I have taken apart have Toshiba drives.  The seem to
perform reliably for years.  (I move, carry, bag & carry laptops all the
time without problems--even Seagate drives and rarely have problems.)

As for eBay, the lower costs of SATA laptop drives purchased from Newegg
makes eBay unattractive to me.  (They are a good source for specialty
drives; I won a 1.8" for my Dell D420 with the Dell wrapper and cable for
half of a new bare drive, for example.)  Mr Bill purhased a nice WB 320GB
7200RPM laptop drive for ~$80 from Newegg.