[Ti] HD Upgrade/Drive Enclosure

[Justin R. Miller]

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 05:22  PM, Eric L. Peters wrote:

> Dear Justin:
>
> As you've already got one on the way, I'd appreciate it very much if 
> you would please let me know how you like the drive once it's 
> installed.

I installed my new 60GB drive on Tuesday, upgrading from the stock 30GB 
that I had in my 667 Ti DVI.  The old model was the MK3018GAS and the 
new one is the MK6021GAS which, as far as I am aware, are basically 
identical aside from the size.  Both have a 2MB buffer and operate at 
4200RPM.

This was my first laptop drive replacement ever, and I also attempted 
(successfully) to run the exact same system after the upgrade, without 
reinstalling.

I have an 80GB Firewire drive, so I set up a >30GB partition, logged in 
as root, and used Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner to sync a copy from the 
30GB drive to the Firewire drive.  I rebooted off of the Firewire 
partition and unmounted the internal drive (and the other Firewire 
partitions) and did a bit of testing to make sure the copy was good.

Then, I followed Apple's Knowledgebase article on swapping hard drives 
and had little difficulty, although I did it slowly and carefully, 
taking perhaps an hour.

I booted the machine alone to check for hardware problems, and it came 
up fine, although with the blinking "question mark folder" since the 
internal 60GB hard drive was blank, as expected.

I then booted again off of the Firewire backup, logged in as root, and 
used CCC to sync back from the Firewire drive to the internal drive, 
rebooted off of the laptop alone, and everything looked fine!  This was 
two days ago and I have yet to notice any problems or differences 
between the old and new systems, data-wise.

What I have noticed is a bit of a speedup.  The 30GB, with about 27GB 
usable after formatting, had about 24GB of data on it (13GB of which is 
my iTunes library).  Now, I have a 56GB drive with about 31GB free.  
I'm not sure if it's the drive or the free space that is causing the 
speedup, but I would suspect the latter.  Most apps start in one or two 
bounces, and the login process is much faster as well.  It was 
previously a chore to have to logout and then log back in, or to reboot 
and log in, since my several login programs would take upwards of 10 to 
15 seconds to settle.  Of course, Panther will make this less necessary 
:-D

The machine has 768MB of RAM and again is a 667 DVI model.  Hope Eric 
and others find this info useful!

--Justin