[Ti] 80 GB suggestion

[Paul Russell]

>I would suggest that you don't rush to install 80 GB drives.
>
>I've only tried them in Big Al's so far. I'll try TiBooks next.
>
>One, created with Carbon Copy Cloner, is working for me now. But 
>I've had a ton of flaky behavior for a few days, since installing 
>this drive.
>
>Just today I had a number of Eudora mail trays lose the ability to 
>access the last few emails. I had to save the prior emails and 
>recreate the mail trays. Then I found my IE favorites gone. The 
>favorites.com file was full of email. Ha ha!
>
>A lot of what I did yesterday involved an 80 GB internal drive and 
>an 80 GB external firewire drive. They both draw 1A. I don't have 
>mine with me right now, but the drives that ship in Big Al might be 
>500 mA.
>
>Today I tried two 80 GB drives in each of 2 brand new (out of box) 
>Big Als. The installer ran but the drives were hosed. That's 0 for 
>4. These Big Als would work with 60 GB drives. I trust the 
>installer, at least on 60 GB drives, because a friend of mine wiped 
>his 60 GB drive clean and installed from scratch, successfully.
>
>new drive + new computer + new install DVD + power drain = bleeding edge.

Also, based on recent experiences, I don't have 100% faith in Carbon 
Copy Cloner. When I bought my new Big Al recently I put it in 
FireWire disk mode and used CCC from my old TiBook to copy the old 
hard disk to the new one. This appeared to work OK but the result was 
a mess that wouldn't even boot (couldn't find /etc/master.passwd) so 
evidently the clone was not perfect. In the end I re-installed 10.2.4 
on the Big Al and then spent hours moving apps, prefs, etc (if you 
thought this kind of things was a mess in Mac OS 9 then wait until 
you try it in OS X !). I'm now _almost_ confident enough to to wipe 
the drive on my old TiBook and put it on eBay, but it's been a 
harrowing process.

Moral of the story: never have 100% faith in anything. ;-)

Paul

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