About a week or so before my wedding my good old HD which was a Toshiba drive which came pre-installed in my PowerBook started to show the old age death signs, it wasn’t much of a surprise as I had noticed quite a few bad blocks showing up on the disc and a general increase in noise from the drive. I can’t recall the model of the drive but it was a nice 80-Gig drive running at 5400 rpm and with a massive 16 megabyte cache, overall I was very happy with this drive, I use my machine for roughly 8 to 12 hours a day and over a period of 3 years the drive has never caused any problems. Even with the drive making odd gestures it still wasn’t really missing a beat, but like many things it’s best to take note of the signs and do something about it before the end.

I needed a replacement drive and looked in to the 100 gig version of the drive only to find out that it had been discontinued. I did some looking and my only real options seemed to be drives from Hitachi and Seagate, the Seagate drives were described as being much quieter so I went for the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 drive. As the model name indicates this is a 7200 rpm drive and I have noticed the speed boost.

Overall I was quite happy with the new drive apart from a loud ticking noise, I did some digging around and found out that this noise is related to the APM (Acoustic Power Management) built in to the drive, this tick that APM causes happens roughly every 20 to 30 seconds, this doesn’t sound too bad at first until you dig a little deeper, every tick and the Hard drives Load_Cycle_Count is incremented by 1, so roughly 69 Cycles an hour. The drives life span is rated at 600,000 cycles. At my current usage rate this drive isn’t gonna live too long.

Please note that this isn’t an isolated case either, this is known to Seagate and it’s not just Seagate that seam to have the problem, Toshiba drives fitted to MacBooks like Louisa’s also have high Load_Cycle_Counts Hitachi are also suffering with these problems. The cause of the problem is that the drive makers are setting the default APM values to the most aggressive value, the Operating System of the machine will normally set these values to a more moderate setting when booted up. There are however some systems that do not change these settings Mac OS X being one of them. So from this we can see there is no person that can correctly be blamed for this mess.

All I can really say is thankgod for Timemachine :) I guess I will just have to use the drive till one day in the future when it pings once too many. If your using a PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro etc… then get hold of the smartmontools from sourceforge and check out your load cycles!

There has been a lot of talk about these Dell laptops that seem to just burst in to flames. What that actually is, is the battery over heating and then exploding. These batteries were made by Sony between 2003 and 2006. I was having a look on the Apple site and saw an exchange program. I checked my batteries model and serial number and I seem to have one too!

It’s all pretty simple, on the exchange page just enter your iBook G4 or PowerBook G4 serial number, the battery serial number and then enter you details. From the info on the page they send you a new battery and you stick the old one in the bag and send it back to them. The exchange is all free. If your running an iBook G4 or PowerBook G4 head over to Battery Exchange Program and check the details.