iBook HD

[Strimkind]

Last night I picked up my old iBook I sold to my old room mate over a year ago. The HD has died, again. Both models were the Toshiba MK3021GAS 30 GB notebook hard drive. First time it would spin up but click. They were able to recover the data from it. The second drive will not even spin up (but it attempts to). The first one lasted a year, the second one just over 2 years.

Has anyone noticed the failure rate of this particular HD or iBooks in general?

 

[Christopher]

My friends 1.07GHz iBook had a weird issue last week with its stock drive.

After the grey loading screen, it would just sit at the blue screen and you can hear the hard drive trying to load something, but it sounded stuck.

Erased the hard drive and installed OS X again, all is well now. It does make me wonder if its going out soon.

It probably has to do with how warm it gets. I found this handy piece of software to help. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/25043/g4fancontrol

I would say its worth the extra noise, plus its variable speed.

 

[Franklinstein]

The service life of hard drives, like many things, is dependent on how they're used.

Particular to a notebook drive, duty cycle is one item of concern. These drives are not designed for 24/7 operation, and if a machine is left running for ages (downloading torrents, say), then this puts loads of stress on the hard drive. By their nature, these drives are constantly loading and unloading the heads after a certain interval (usually between 5 and 15 seconds after idle, regardless of computer power settings). So they'll incur more wear in a shorter time than a desktop designed more for constant operation, or a notebook used a couple of hours each day and then put to sleep or shut down.

Anyway, 2 years is an average service life for the 2002/3-era drives with high mileage. I've never been a huge Toshiba fan, but haven't noticed any massive failure trends. Most iBooks are typically associated with failure of the GPU or power subsystem (which is mostly Apple's fault) than with disk failure (which is the drive manufacturer's fault).

 

[Scott Baret]

Those Toshiba drives are lemons. I had the same 30GB in an iBook G4 (mid-2005); it lasted only two years. The guy who sold me a new one acted as if the drives had a fairly high failure rate.

I've had bad luck with other Toshiba drives as well--both hard drives and CD-ROMs.

I think I had a Hitachi installed in the iBook when I gave it to my cousin at Christmas. Of all the current drive manufacturers I have had the best luck with them.

 

[Christopher]

My Pismo had it's stock 20GB Toshiba until about 6 months ago when it decided to not spin at all. Still, thats long for a laptop drive without the sudden motion sensor if you ask me.