MacSailing.net

Good evening all of you,
I use an ibook G4 800 Mhz, 640 GB for Navigation with GPSNavX and MacEnc in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean. I had to replace the hard drive now 3 times. The first time I thought that the reason was the difficulty I had with the Power supply. But after the third time, the ibook broke down, I think now that the hard drive crashes, because the vibrations or even shocks are too hard. We sailed sometimes in rough conditions.
Does anybody have the same experience or have any idea to avoid hard drive crashes in the future? I dont want to use another of my powerbooks or buy a macbook air just for navigation, because otherwise the ibook works fine (surprisingly with Mac OS X 10.5.4
I hope someone can help
Jochen

Hi Jochen

Harddisks aren't made for the rude offshore conditions.
A guy at our sailing club did a world tour some years ago. During his 2 ±"years trip he killed 2 laptops (PC) and 5 HDs!

If you buy the MacBook Air try to get the SSD version, as RAMs aren't vulnerable to physical shocks.

Another idea which probably works as well is the use of several GB memorystick. Run your applications and charts from the memorystick. I think it is even possible to start OS X from the memorystick. This way the HD won't used. But I don't know if there are memory sticks big enough to have the complete OS X installed?

Any ideas?

Regards,

Manou

Here's the link how to install and boot OS X on a memory stick.

http://www.bradbergeron.com/2006/11/howt...ash-drive/

instead of a memory stick, why not use an ipod nano as a boot/storage device?