No sooner did I read Tom’s interesting analysis of his decision to go back to wintel for his laptop needs than I am presented with a low-space dialog regarding this laptop’s internal 70gb drive. Tom notes that from his perspective, Powerbook HDs are not upgradeable. As someone who once performed a hard-drive upgrade on an original iBook, my bet is that upgrades are actually possible, but a giant pain in the neck.
Some research on the subject, for reference. Interestingly, most of this info clearly concerns older Powerbooks.
Almost everyone I work with routinely upgrades their own Powerbook HD, so if you’ve done the iBook upgrade, you’ll have no problems doing so with a new Powerbook.
I, however, must humbly suggest an external Firewire drive archive system. For instance, get a nice LaCie 250GB drive or, better yet, a 500GB drive, and store the bulk of what takes up space on that. At home, I have a 200GB drive and a 250GB drive, one which stores all movies, the other stores my mp3 collection, as well as samples, Reason files, ProTools sessions, etc. For a while, I wondered whether or not I’d need those things on the local drive, but I’ve found that any time I’m ready to sit down and do serious audio work, I’m likely going to want to be sitting down at my desk, though the Firewire drives are also portable, which I used when we played the Portland music festival thing. I just plugged the 250GB drive in next to the laptop, and presto, I was just as portable as I would have been with just the laptop.
Also, my pal David has uncovered good info from PBFixit on upgrading late model PBs.
Dead Ink Vinyl: PBFixit Rules