Powerbook Hard Drive Woes!, Replacement suggestions Options

[minskybabs]

Hello everybody,

Oh woe is me, my 80Gb factory fitted hard drive on my powerbook (G4 alu 1.25Ghz 15 inch w 1.25Gb Ram, out of warranty, no applecare!!) is dying/has died/is an ex hard drive.

One day when checking my emails, the laptop froze, and I had to hard reboot, this kept on happening, I re installed OSx tiger and it seemed better for an hour or so, then died again. Finally I managed to get it mounted, by starting up from a bootable back up on an external FW drive, and using Disk warrior (god bless Alusoft!!) I have managed to salvage all my important data (my last backup was a little longer ago than it should have been, oops lesson learnt!).

However both Disk warrior and now I notice it, disk utility in Tiger report that the S.M.A.R.T. status is failing, which sounds bad, and from my investigations means the disk is soon to go to the great hard drive scrapheap.

Anyone had this happen, and have any advice on replacements?

I don't really fancy replacing the drive myself, it looks like a nightmare, my local apple centre quotes around £360 UK for replacement, I have managed to find a smaller repair man who is apple experienced who has quoted around £190. It seems hard to find out which hard drives are MAC compatible, I have looked at xlr8yourmac for the drive database, but can't find the drives mentioned there, on the net in the UK.

ANy thoughts on the trade off of disk size, speed and heat. I don't really use it from the battery, but don't want it getting hotter than it already does. It is used for music (normally with the external drive) and itunes and iphoto and surfing, a seperate account. I guess I want as much space as possible, and as I use an external hd for audio, the speed is less important? Or if I got a fast drive (eg 7200 rpm instead of 54000 rpm) maybe I could use the Mac for audio without the external drive, most people suggest that the external drive is always a better idea?

Thanks for any thoughts.
Minskybabs.