After I received my empeg 30GB, and looked at the whimpy but crowded 10GB in my G4 Powerbook and my small 4GB MP3 collection, the answer was obvious: swap the disks.

All went well (Powerbook running, empeg playing), BUT...

When booted into Mac OSX 10.1.2, the Powerbook sometimes goes into a funk when spinning up:
It seems to be stuck in an endless loop. It makes the characterisitic sound of the mechanism after spin up (head tracking, not the rotational spin-up sound of the disks themselves), over and over and over again. The OS is unresponsive, well sort-of: Mouse cursor moves, Dock icons still zoom, sometimes I can change focus to other applications. But then the rainbow cursor comes on. That's the end.

Even the three-finger reset does not cure the problem. I have to power down completely and back up.

You will say it's a HD issue, but this never happens in OS9.2.2, it ran a few days with various spin-ups and -downs and no problem.

Do you know about anything that may be different in the empeg HDs? I assumed they were just standard notebook drives.

Any other ideas?

Armin

I'm sure that the empeg drive has a much slower RPM rating than your PowerBook drive.

I'm sure that the empeg drive has a much slower RPM rating than your PowerBook drive.

Ummmm... why would that be? The empeg uses standard off-the-shelf 2.5" notebook hard drives from various manufacturers.

tanstaafl.

Somebody stated previously (one othe Cambridge guys, I want to say) that they use very slow (read not-top-of-the-line) RPM drives because there's no point in getting the fast ones because the speed wouldn't be used. I expect that the drive in the PowerBook is top-of-the-line as far as RPM goes. (My experience with Apple tends to indicate that they don't skimp on this sort of area.) And given how heavily MacOSX swaps, it sounds like a reasonable assumption. Given that he's opened both products, he can certainly give both drives a look-see. I could be wrong; it's just a guess.

IBM Travelstar drives are among the fastest available 2.5" drives. Of course there are two tiers of high capacity TravelStars.. The ones in my 60GB unit are.. waitasec while I browse to /proc/ide/hda/model.. IBM-DJSA-230 drives. And my older 18GB Mk2 unit has a... IBM-DARA-218000 drive.

Now.. visiting IBM.com to look up the specs.. DJSA-230 = 4200RPM with media transfer rate (the important number) of 108.8 to 202.9Mbits/sec == very fast for 2.5" drives, but not the fastest one they make.

The older DARA-218000 is also 4200rpm, but slower media rates of 85.5 to 161.6 Mbits/sec.

Not shabby. By comparism, their top drive TravelStar 60GH (60GB capacity) bosts 5400rpm and data rates "up to" 262 Mbits/sec.

-ml

OS X is notorious for being more finicky about drives than OS 9. This is particularly true of SCSI disks (not the case here obviously). Might want to check your cabling and make sure you don't have a loose or pinched drive cable. Might also want to double check any jumpers on the drive to be sure they are making solid connections. But, the repeated seeks sound may be an indication of bad sectors on the drive that it is attempting to read. Have you tried running a disk utility and see what is says? You can use fsck from single user mode if you can't boot from something else to use Apple's utilities.

-Mike

Mike,

yes, OSX is more picky about everything (CPU, RAM, HD, ...)!
I ran a test tool over night (in OS 9). It completed four full sweeps with no errors found.

To answer some of the other comments: I didn't note the drives partnumber, but it's a current model Toshiba, so I'd venture to guess 4200 rpm (this is standard for all 2.5" drives but the 48GB Travelstars @ 5400rpm). It certainly doesn't appear to be slower than the stock 10GB Travelstar.

Also found a workaround: just set Energy Saver to never spin down the drive. The problem appears to be related to spin-up. Maybe this drive takes longer to come online and OSX times out and retries? Then on the retry it times out again, ...

Anyway, I'll have slightly lower battery life, but who cares!

Thanks for everybodys comments!

Armin

PS: car install almost done, just need the docking sled drilled...