PowerBook 1400 Hard Drive Replacement

[l008com]

I'm going to try to replace a failed hard drive in a powerbook 1400. The original drive is 1 GB, but of course you can't get 1 GB drives anymore. It is an ATA drive though. You can still get brand new 80 GB pata/ide drives on newegg for under $60. 

But the question is... are there any issues with volume size with these machines? I know there was a time when you'd have to have a 12 GB partition with the OS on it for some Macs to boot. And other Macs could only see 128 GB or so of any disk. Things like that. Do any of these quirks apply to putting a much larger hard drive in a powerbook 1400?

 

[360alaska]

If I were you i'd just get a cf to ide, it works great in mine!

 

[beachycove]

You can buy a 40g PATA drive new on eBay from china for about $12, and that's shipped. That's a good deal, and a lot cheaper than a similarly-sized CF card, though there would most likely be a long wait.

A 1400 should be able to deal with any such drive so long as set up in 8.1 or better, but do your homework to be sure that you really want all that storage in a 1990s laptop. You'd never fill it up, realistically, unless you were to install more or less every piece of period software still available on the planet.

If you want to run, 7.6.1, on the other hand, with an appropriate range of period applications, then a small (say 2gb) CF drive would be price competitive, quieter, more energy-efficient, and probably faster than even one of those new 40-gigers.

 

[Cory5412]

Some have said there is an 8.4-gig limit, but I have a 30 gig disk in mine with no trouble. I'm booting 7.6 off an 8 gig partition, 8.6 off a further 10 gig partition, and the rest of the disk is one big disk.

If you're using 8 or newer with HFS+, there should hypothetically be no trouble with big disks.

If you're concerned or if it doesn't work, I recommend making an 8-gig boot partition and format the rest as one single partition for data.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Linkage to Chinese spinning correctness?

 

[Cory5412]

I wrote my reply then failed to post for almost two hours.

One thing I'll note about storage sizes is that my 1400, for its large storage capacity (and you could do this with a 32-64 gig CF card as well) has taken on an interesting role as a file server for the 840av. It would of course be better if both the 840 and the 1400 had Ethernet access to a server, but the 1400 has been able to serve well as a swing space for my 840, 180, etc. That may be something that only applies to my situation, because Iv'e got some things set up in two different areas.

 

[rsolberg]

The 128GB addressing limit does apply to the PowerBook 1400 and all other built in ATA controllers in Macs prior to about 2002. Other than that issue, I'm not aware of any quirks with the 1400. There's an issue on Old World ROM Macs where the Mac OS X partition should reside within the first 8GB of the disk, but it has no effect on previous versions of the Mac OS, so it's of little consequence on the 1400.

 

[Compgeke]

My 1400 has a 60 gig drive with a 60 gig partition and OS 8.6. Works fine, no problems at all. 

 

[beachycove]

Linkage to Chinese spinning correctness?

 
Right now at http://www.ebay.com/itm/381522311912?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Others similarly priced.

 

[l008com]

Thanks for the info. Looks like this job is falling through after all. But I'm sure someone, years from now, will find this thread through google and find these answers interesting. 

I was going to go with the brand new $40 80 GB drive from newegg. WD Blue. 

Going from a 1 GB drive to an 80 GB drive. Imagine upgrading a 1 TB drive in a modern laptop, to an 80 TB drive. That would be crazy. 

 

[Unknown_K]

You can find decent deals for bulk 10-40GB IDE laptop drives on ebay from time to time as people dump them since everyone uses SATA these days. I stocked up in the last couple years. Individual IDE drives under 10GB and over 40GB are still pricey. And be careful some of the older drives are double thick.

 

[Cory5412]

Honestly I almost wish I could have the 80TB now. Perhaps as an external USB 3.0 disk rather than a disk in my laptop.

Going from a 1 GB drive to an 80 GB drive. Imagine upgrading a 1 TB drive in a modern laptop, to an 80 TB drive. That would be crazy. 

Beyond about Sandy Bridge or so (when 1TB laptop disks started to become common anyway) this should hypothetically be possible, in terms of address space. I don't know how this played out in laptops, but I've got a RAID controller that I bought in ~2010 that will not recognized "advanced format" disks that are above 2TB in size.

 

[l008com]

I've got an 8 Bay USB3 drive tower that is supposed to be able to handle 6 TB and I think even 8 TB hard drive. That would get you in the neighborhood. I just have it filled with whatever random hard drive sI bought for my last home server many years ago. Desktop drives sure do last compared to laptop. Also some of the bays in this thing are laptop too. I was swayed by the idea of using even less electricity.