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General discussion

resources for notebook HD replacemt?

Sep 17, 2006 7:43AM PDT

I'm looking to upgrade the HD on my fujitsu s6120d notebook from 40g to 100g, but I'm new to this and am having a heck of a time finding info about the various brands etc. Are there big diffces among the brands/ models? I'm most concerned about reliability, but i also have questions about, like, whether this old horse can run the new 7k100s. Where's a good place to look for this sort of info?

Any advice you can offer will be much appreciated! And apologies in advance if this subj has come up before -- I've just been lurkin 'round the forums for a while and haven't found the answer to this yet.
Thanks much!

Discussion is locked

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The 2 places I've picked them up at is...
Sep 17, 2006 8:35AM PDT

newegg.com and geeks.com

Bob

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A great starting point is Newegg..
Sep 17, 2006 10:51AM PDT

Newegg.com is a great resource ...good product desciptions, good product search engine, good prices good service and buyer product reviews too.

ZipZoomFly.com is another good one but their WEBSITE is not nearly as good (user friendly) as Newegg IMHO.

VAPCMD

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(NT) (NT) thanks much! n/t
Sep 17, 2006 11:08AM PDT
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And are they more or less interchangeable?
Sep 18, 2006 8:21AM PDT

So I've spent a while checking out newegg.com (a great site, thank you for the recommendation!) and just have one question still unanswered: Are these drives pretty much interchangeable? I've looked through the documentation for my computer and found what I could about drive height etc., but ... is there anything in particular I ought to worry about (or any way to make sure that say, a certain big, fast Hitachi drive will do all right on my ol' girl?).

Thanks again for your kind help!

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Limitations....your system BIOS, your OS and the cradle ...
Sep 18, 2006 10:06AM PDT

size for the HDD. Re the cradle ... I'm referring to the frame that holds the hard drive. First things first...the hard drive's gotta physically fit in the frame. Tell us a little more what PC (laptop) do you have ....what OS and SP and what HDD do you have now ?

VAPCMD

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This computer ...
Sep 18, 2006 11:41PM PDT

is a Fujitsu S6120D notebook. The drive is listed as a Toshiba MK4021GAS -- that's a 40gig drive. I'm running Windows XP with SP2. Processor is a Pentium M 1.4. Recently upgraded to 760mb RAM.

My friend recommended a Hitachi Travelstar drive -- he says he doesn't think it'd be a problem to run a 7k100, 100gig drive, but he admits he doesn't know laptops all that well. I'm just looking for something that might let me run Quark and Indesign a little more smoothly (and give me the extra HD space, of course).

Thanks so much for your advice and help with this!

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Here's some specs on your Toshiba HDD...dimensions
Sep 19, 2006 1:42PM PDT

plus model numbers of two Seagate notebooks HDDs ATA6 7200 RPM 100GB and 80GB respectively that I also say at NewEgg...the Seagates have 5 yr warranties.

Momentus 7200.1
ST910021A 100GB
ST980825A 80GB

Hitachi 7200 RPM 80GB or 100GB should also be good.

Either of these should give you a noticeable speed boost and mucho more diskspace.

http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=818200000007000000010000659800001516/818200000aff000000010000659c000026ad/818200000192000000010000659c0000279f/818200000c6e000000010000659c00002c76/818200000c6f000000010000659c00002c78

The specs shows the overall height 9.5MM...some older ones used to be slightly taller...12MM (?).

Two other points/questions...would you better off going to a desktop ? I don't know much about either of the two programs you mentioned but suspect like most others...RAM, video and CPU play a big part on how they run. That's tough to do in a notebook without busting the piggy bank.

The other issue/question is there any problem reinstalling WinXP with the new (much larger) HDD and your notebook. Companies like Dell, Gateway, maybe Toshiba, gear their restore/installations to the same HW profile originally purchased so maybe the install disk won't install right on a 80 or 100GB HDD. Might want to repost some or all of the info you've collected in the Notebook forum. All of these limitations can be overcome for the most part....just knowing what to expect and being somewhat prepared moves you to the head of the class.

Let us know what you decide on and how it works.

VAPCMD

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(NT) (NT) Thanks for your kind help! N/T
Sep 20, 2006 1:09AM PDT