the "Bionic" iBook

It's official -- the hard drive in my iBook is kaput.

A friend of mine (who is always eager to learn more about "under the hood" of computers) asked me to try to explain what happened. I'd like to oblige-- except I'm more of a software geek than a hardware nut, so how do you try to explain something you don't completely understand yourself?

Basically, there are two things that can go wrong with a hard drive-- either the information on the hard drive can get erased/scrambled up, or the actual physical matter of the hard drive can be damaged. Neither situation is "good", but the first one can usually be resolved more easily than the second. You basically wipe the hard drive clean, restore your data from your most recent backup, and move on from there.

When the physical apparatus of the drive is actually damaged, however, you have to either repair or replace the hard drive before you can do anything else. (The hard drive is, as I understand it, basically a stack of magnetic-sensitive platters, and there are "heads" that move in and around these platters "reading" and "writing" information.)

So, I get to crack open my old iBook case and see if I can remove the old drive and replace it with a new one.

The good news is that a comparable hard drive (ATA 100 4200 RPM at 30GB) is pretty cheap-- under $50 easily, if you shop around. I could pay for someone with a lot more experience to replace the drive, but that quickly adds up to an amount that approaches the cost of a new computer. Besides, you don't learn as much if you get someone else to do the dirty work for you. ;)

This all begs the question, though-- if I'm going to go to the trouble of cracking open my laptop case, why should I stop at replacing the hard drive with the exact same hard drive that was already in there? Why not track down a bluetooth module and install that, too? Why not put a 60 GB drive in instead, or even a 120 GB drive, and chop them into several partitions (Mac OS X/Ubuntu/etc.)? Or, even go really nutzo with it and see if there's some way to hack an interface to a "steady state" drive, like the Air Book currently has as an option?

Yeah, I know-- that last option is the kind of thinking that gets me in hot water in the first place. But still, if you're going to spend time and effort fixing something, why not make it better than it originally was instead of just getting back to the status quo?