Performing a Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade
A lot of folks are unaware of the ease with which a laptop hard drive upgrade can be performed and, because of that, they might get rid of a perfectly good laptop, thinking its obsolete, years before its useful life is over. The most common reasons cited for apparent obsolescence are insufficient space on the hard drive, insufficient memory (RAM), and insufficient CPU speed. In the first two cases, hard drive and memory, relatively simple low cost upgrades can prolong the life of a laptop. This section focuses on upgrading the hard disk drive installed in a laptop. Armed with a little information, a screwdriver and a couple hundred bucks a laptop hard drive upgrade can be accomplished with relative ease.
Assuming your laptop was manufactured after 1997 and/or currently employs a 3.0GB or larger hard disk drive; your laptop hard drive upgrade choices are, essentially, unfettered and unlimited. With few exceptions, and all those pertain to laptops manufactured prior to 1997, laptop hard drives utilize a 9.5mm hard drive height. Likewise, laptop hard drive mounting hole patterns are standardized with the screw holes located 3 inches apart on the long side. The screw holes are used for mounting the bare hard drive to the hard drive caddy with eight screws; four on the bottom and two on each long side.
Laptop Hard Drive Choices
Since laptop hard drives are not proprietary to any laptop manufacturer; any laptop hard drive will work in any laptop. Almost. While nearly all laptops incorporate 2.5″ mobile hard disk drives there are a few ultra-portable laptops that use 1.8″ drives. Three or four more things to consider when shopping for your new hard drive include:
- Capacity: Not all laptops, due to BIOS or Operating System limitations, can take advantage of hard drive capacities in excess of 80 GB. In order to access the full capacity of an ATA interface hard drive, for example, with a capacity greater than 137GB, and properly support 48-bit logical block addressing, a minimum operating system configuration of Windows XP (Service Pack 1) or Windows 2000 (SP 4) is required.
- Speed: Laptop hard drives are currently available with the following spindle speeds:
- 4200 RPM: The spindle speed most commonly found in older laptops. Since it takes less power to turn the platter at this slower speed; battery life is extended.
- 5400 RPM: Most of the newer 5400 RPM disks provide a boost in performance with very little, if any, reduction in battery life. If both performance and long battery life are of importance to you then chances are good that a 5400 RPM hard drive will suit your needs.
- 7200 RPM: High-performance; but with a sacrifice in battery life. Even at truck stops I’m usually able to plug-in so battery life isn’t the most important issue; at least for me. High-performance, though, generally equates into higher cost so I’ve not opted to upgrade my laptop hard drive to a 7200 RPM speed and power burner.
- Interface: Most laptop hard disk drives use an ATA (IDE, EIDE) interface while fewer, and mostly newer, laptops might be set up to use a Serial ATA (SATA) interface. Your laptop will be equipped with one or the other. ATA and SATA laptop hard drives are NOT interchangeable.
- Buffer: The Buffer Cache is a temporary data storage area used to enhance drive performance. When data’s requested from the hard drive the buffer cache is checked first since it’s a lot faster to retrieve it from the cache than the drive. Most laptop hard drives incorporate 8MB buffers. Some, however, are limited to 4MB while still others may offer a 16MB cache.
Laptop Hard Drive - Remove & Replace
Now that you’ve determined which laptop hard drive your going to buy and you’ve chosen the method you’re going to use to transfer data; it’s necessary to know the method for removal and replacement of the hard drive unit. This information should be available from your laptop manufacturer or from the manual supplied with the laptop (you’ve still got the manual, don’t you?). In any case; here’s step-by-step instructions.
After choosing & purchasing your new laptop hard drive and transferring the old data onto the new hard drive; the only thing left to do is remove the old drive and install the new hard drive in it’s place. The actual swap of the laptop hard drives is probably the easiest task of all. Since you’ve gotten hard drive removal instructions from the manufacturer or the manual supplied with the laptop (you do have instructions, right?) all that’s really necessary is to follow them carefully. Nonetheless, what follows is a generic, step-by-step, set of instructions for performing a laptop hard drive R&R:
- By means of your preferred method; transfer data from your old laptop drive to the new drive.
- Be certain, absolutely certain, that all power is disconnected and remove the battery from the laptop before you begin the installation!
- If applicable; disconnect modem and/or network cables.
- Disconnect peripheral devices and remove any PC cards.
- WARNING! A hard drive may be easily damaged by ESD (Electrostatic Discharge). Avoid, as much as possible, touching the interface connector pins and the surface of PCB. Use an ESD proof wrist strap and grounding cord, if at all possible, when handling the hard drive and perform the process on a surface not likely to create an ESD.
- Remove the outer screws holding the laptop hard drive in place. Their number and location vary from one laptop to another so…either consult the manual or make a really good guess.
- Lift and slide the hard drive assembly out of the drive bay. The hard drive slides into the interface so chances are better than even that the assembly slides nearly straight out or that there’s an indentation next to the bay indicating the side to be lifted. After lifting slightly you can pull the drive assembly out.
- Remove the screws securing the old hard drive to the caddy and take the old drive out.
- Insert the new hard drive into the caddy and secure it with the screws.
- Carefully slide the new hard drive assembly back into the laptop hard drive bay and replace the screws securing it.
- Replace the battery.
- Reattach any modem, network or AC cables that you previously disconnected.
Once the swap is complete you can boot the system and enjoy! Windows may detect the upgraded hard drive as a new device, install it and then ask you to reboot. No sweat.
s your old laptop hard drive running out of space? You probably know that you can upgrade your desktop computer’s hard drive. But you may not know that you can upgrade the hard drive on your laptop. Here, we’ll show you how to double or even triple the hard drive space on your laptop.
What you need
Let’s run through how to upgrade a ThinkPad with a 30GB hard drive. In this case, we’ll change it to a 100GB drive that I bought on the Web.
You’ll also need some software that will clone the old drive. Cloning turns your new drive into an exact replica of the old one, so all you have to do is swap it in and boot up. You’ll also need a way to attach the new hard drive to the laptop.
I bought an EZ upgrade kit that included a case for attaching the new hard drive and came with data transfer software. That’s the easiest way to go. It also lets you turn your old drive into an additional external drive after you’re done upgrading.
Before you begin
Before you start the data transfer, you must clean up your old drive. Delete any unwanted files and uninstall programs you don’t use. You don’t want to waste time transferring data you don’t need. You’ll also want to defragment your disk drive.
Transfer the data
Now I’ll run through the upgrade on my ThinkPad. You may have slightly different experiences if you have a different laptop or use different connectors and software, but this will give you the general idea.
Take the new drive and mount it carefully in the case. Be very careful with hard drives. They can’t take any banging around or squeezing. There’s delicate machinery in there.
Make sure your laptop is off. Attach the USB cable and attach the drive to the laptop. Put in the EZ Gig disk-cloning software and boot directly from the CD. Once it boots, choose Automatic so that the software will set up the way the data will be copied. It will ask you to specify which drive is new and which drive is old. Make sure you choose correctly, then tell it to begin.
One thing to note here is the way partitions are laid out. With my ThinkPad, I had to go in and set the IBM Update partition manually. The EZ Gig software enlarges all partitions proportionally. The IBM system didn’t like that, so I had to make adjustments.
Once it’s grinding through the data transfer, go take a break; it may take an hour or so, depending on how much data you’re copying.
Swap the hard drives
When it’s done, turn off the laptop. Unplug it and remove the battery to make certain you don’t fry any components, or worse, electrocute yourself. Then look in your user manual for how to remove the hard drive. Open up the laptop and carefully take out the old drive.
Once you get the old hard drive out of the laptop, look to see if there’s a hard drive cradle. Remove the cradle from the old drive and attach it to the new drive.
Then take the new drive out of the case and put it in the laptop. Close up the laptop, reinsert the battery and the power cord, and restart the machine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll want to put the old drive back in and troubleshoot the new drive.
If it does work, as it did in my case, you’ve just doubled or tripled your hard drive space. What will you do with all that space? Don’t say BitTorrent. You disappoint me.
What to do with the old drive
Now take the old drive and put it in the case. Voilà: you have an instant external backup drive. Just delete all of the old data, or better yet, leave it there and maintain it as a backup.
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