I am putting this as a blog because this is what its intended as. A note. IDE is not widely used anymore and I am the only person here doing this shit 24/7/365. Put it as hardware if you want, but its just a note relevant to .07% of this forum (my blog notes keep getting changed and its annoying me. Thx).
I have an ibook that I absolutely adore. It is the lowest end model that was possible to get. 128 MB total ram, 30 GB HDD, 1.07 GHZ PPC 7445-A18 Proc, And this one didn't even come with a battery. It was special ordered as a replacement unit for a business and someone bought it from the business and maxed it out ram and battery wise, left the faulty HDD in (and I'll tell you why it was faulty), then never used it for the 6 years it was in the owners possession.
SO, why did the HDD fail? I want you guys to think of a PATA / mIDE HDD right now. Where the jumper location is is part of the plug right on the unit for the HDD. On certain hard drives the jumper lines would also function as sensor relays. If your drive did not have built in sensors then you could install, use the drive for probably about an hour, and the thing would die.
Apple used 3 drive companies. HGST, WD, and SeaGate. Being honest here, and I don't mind if you like WD or not, you were absolutely fucked if you had a WD drive in your ibook. With the powerbooks you had sensors externally that you could stick on the HDD itself. Of course you also paid 2000 USD more for it so it was expected that you would be getting better setups (most often the probes were cut out because the multi-spindle drives that were like 250-350 GB were so hot in such a short amount of time in use the probe would freak out and shut the system off, just for note).
So that apple could save money, they bought drives that they THOUGHT had SMART diagnostics. I assume that most of you know what that is, but in case you don't, SMART is a diagnostic toolset that has to be built into a drive and detected in OS to activate. On most drives SMART just does low level defrag and format (if you paid a lot for it that is), RPM detection, sector count, and in the case for apple's ibooks Temperature detection. Now, because 2 of 3 ibooks were shipped with drives capable of temp detect, I'm labeling it TD from now on in this post, any drive without TD would do the same thing as the powerbooks. If it doesn't just not detect TD and shut down, it can do MUCH worse. For my unit if TD is not on the drive the unit can freeze on bootup from mid hardware detection, or it can boot after installation but the drive will do anything from a list of shit such as overspin the HDD motor and warp the discs, not detect the discs but be bootable from a CD, and frag the drive with random data, thus sending the MOBO scrambled data and killing it somehow.
Wait, sorry, "~logic board~"
I hate that term...
So, in any case if you get an ibook, save yourself time and buy a 100 GB Seagate Momentus OR BarracudaGC. 54-7200 RPM switchable on the Momentus so you can do low power or high performence so I would look for one of those if I were you.
And remember, don't throw it away or I will hit you with a book! :DDDD
Or a mac mini.
Either way, ow.