How fast of a HD Can you Put in 1 GHz Ti ?

No limits on spindle speed. Physical size is limited to 12.5mm thick.

You are limited to smaller capacity PATA drives however, as the TiBook's 32-bit LBA ATA controller can't handle drives over the 137GB (128GB) limit.

Well, it can but you must needs buy a driver (SpeedTools) to workaround the hardware's limitations.

dan k

Having a 1.5GHz Mini running Leo with a 5400RPM Seagate in it, I must say that the HDD seems to be my biggest speed limit, followed by the RAM size limit of 1GB. I've been considering putting in a faster drive as 7200RPM in the Mini should help a lot. It should help a Ti quite a bit, but the 1GHz CPU will show it's age under Leo. It will run fine, but compared to anything of the last G4s on to the Intel Macs it's going be be noticeably slower.

I dropped a 160GB 7200rpm SATA Seagate into my wife's Intel Mac mini, and it helped quite a bit.

Here's one: SanDisk Unveils 32GB Drop-In Replacement Drive for Notebooks

At some point, I'd like to upgrade the noisy, power consuming, slow 10Gb hard disk in my computer with at least a 12Gb solid state drive. I am waiting for the price to go down, way down, and it will. I think the manufacturers are milking this at moment, as I am seeing prices from $600 to $40000 for these drives. My most recent 1Gb jump drive acquisition cost $20 including getting a domain name for a year. The prices will go down. I don't need large capacity, see for yourself:
sys/apps disk: 2.02Gb used, 1.67Gb available
document disk: 615.6Mb used, 4.39Gb available

Depending on the system a 4GB Compact Flash in a CF to ATA adapter is all one needs, and if it's one of those ones with dual slots one can put in another CF for basic storage and then have a large capacity spinning disk for large media/backup storage, and set it to spin down. With out a bunch of file storage and media I can put a full install of Ubuntu with several extra apps in under 4GB. With enough RAM (1GB+ in most cases) you really don't need swap, which it is recommended not to put on flash media anyway. Of course putting the large spinning drive as a NAS in a closet is even better.

I've had thoughts of putting one of the 7200rpm 160GB drives into my Mini, but what happens with heat from the faster drives, and even more so in a laptop?

In a laptop I'd check the OEM specs for the thermal output of the drive and try to find something that is either lower, or just barely higher. In a mini I wouldn't worry too much as long as the fan is clean. My mini rarely runs up the fan unless it hit a high CPU load of a while. I don't think a few more watts radiating from the HDD is going to change that much unless it's trying to work harder, which means the fan will be spinning faster from the CPU load anyway.

Hmm, now that I'm looking back over the possibilities, I guess there isn't a 160GB 7200rpm 2.5" drive out there for my G4 Mini. There seems to be only SATA drives with those specs. The Hitachi 100GB Travelstar looks like the best option in EIDE.

Here's a LEM article dealing with this thread's subject:
http://www.lowendmac.com/musings/06/0614.html

We haven't had any heat problems so far with the mini. Considering that folks have replaced the CPUs in Intel minis with much faster ones and not had heat problems, I don't think the minimal heat increase from a 7200rpm drive is going to cause problems.

If I were to throw in a 146GB 15k SAS drive, though...

Aluminum G4s cost about the same as Titanium G4s *not* in falling-apart shape, and for Leopard having a 2GB vs 1GB RAM ceiling is a *big deal*.

Unless you're getting a really sweet deal on that Ti I'd strongly recommend skipping it. Everything in a Ti is just plain obsolete. 1 GB RAM ceiling, 128GB HD limitation, USB 1.1, 802.11b-only... all problems solved by coughing up $50 more for a 1/1.25 Ghz Aluminum.

--Peace

I saw this artile this morning and was sad that it's SATA only. I'd love 250GB inside my mini... And at $165 too? Man.

Hey Jon, maybe you and I just need to read the writing on the wall. It's a very rare day I ever use Classic anymore, anyway. I could sell my G4 Mini for probably $400. I see brand new Intel Duo Minis are selling on eBay for less than $500--with warranty, no less. Or maybe Apple will really surprise us and come out with a "Mini" that uses 3.5" hard drives, the way it should have been all along.

The writing probably won't be on the wall until 10.6 though. As long as my machine is still supported on the latest OS X I'm not giving up hope.