Two hard disks in a laptop

In a desktop PC we can have two hard disks. Is it possible to have two hard disks in a laptop?

Very often if a fault arises and there is a hard disk failure it results in loss of everything. If important data or backup clones are stored in the second hard drive we can use that. An additional partition in the hard disk drive does not help in the case of hard disk failure. USB drives (pen drives or external hard disk drives) are awfully slow.

I hane an old Dell laptop Latitude D810 with a 100 GB hard disk and a brother of mine has an old Dell Latitude C640 with a 40 GB hard disk. Both of us are interested in adding an additional hard disk drive if possible. Even if we go in for new laptops (any brand) we should like to ensure the availabllity of two hard drives.

Is that possible? GUIDANCE PLEASE

Um, to answer your question quite literally... you can have more than one hard drive in a laptop if there is an available slot, which means your laptop would already have more than one hard drive if the capability existed.

Now on to redundancy and RAID... You ought to probably do some research, you don't just get to keep your data if a drive fails, you have to make sure your hardware supports RAID, you have to know how to set it up, and maintain it, or recreate it if you will, if you do have a drive failure.

In short... if your laptop doesn't already have two hard drives, then don't even bother.

Thanks KBits, boonality and aford10. There is of course no question of not having an optical drive.

I have a Western Digital Pocketbook Hard Drive and my brother has a Lacie External Hard Drive, both NTFS, but they are awfully slow, taking about 2 hours to copy a folder of about 5 GB. Our laptops have only USB 2 ports, no firewire. Even with large size flashdrives (16 GB, 32 GB) transfer speed is no better.

How do I find out what the speed of our external Hard Drives are,

Are there other brands of laptop that offer two hard disk drives? Can any of you suggest any?

There's absolutely no point to a 10krpm external. They are limited by the USB port speeds anyways, so why would you spend the extra money for a high speed drive?

Now, 5GB should not take 2 hrs to transfer with almost any hard drive - that sounds like a port problem. Are your laptops USB 1.1 only? I can transfer 12 gigs onto my (16GB) flash drive in about 20 mins, and that speed is limited by the relatively slow flash drive, not the USB port (I can transfer the same 12 gigs onto my external hard drive in 5 or 6 minutes).

Internal notebook drives are faster than the USB port is, so an internal drive will be faster than any external that connects with USB. As for the space, I can't argue with that - the external definitely will offer more space if that is the key concern. There's no reason to get a 10krpm though - a 7200rpm external can easily saturate the interface, making any more speed somewhat pointless.

Newegg was selling a case that would hold 2 SSD's in a RAID1 configuration that fit into a SATA drive bay. perhaps speed and redundancy, of course for a price.

I have an HP 9330us that has two HDD bays. I put a 320gb drive in each one and they both work great.

GoatJacko,
I find on the HP website a dv9330us but it does not mention two HDD bays. Can uou kindly post the link for this model?

I have a HP Pavilion DV9620us laptop with two 120GB hard drives, one in bay 1 and one in bay 2. My daughter has the same laptop with a 250gb in bay 1 and nothing in bay 2.

I too had an HP laptop with 2 drives. The greatest advantage of this is that the main operating system drive gets the wear and you keep your data safe on the 2nd seldom used drive. Before I sold this laptop I was considering installing a 32gb solid state drive as the main operating system drive and a large 7200RPM drive to store my data.

1. Can an esata port be connected to my Western Digital Passport HDD (160GB) and my brother's Lacie 360 GB External HDD ? If so what kind of connector would it need?

2. Would esata be faster than the forthcoming USB-3?

I asked HP about the DV7 series and they said yes.

I also looked inside an Acer 7735z. There was a space but no connector on the motherboard.

These are 17 inch laptops, which gives more space for the second drive.

This is the reply from HP:



The HP Pavilion dv7 notebook PC series does have (2) hard drive slots with all applicable connectivity needed to install another hard drive.



You may need to purchase the "SPS-HDD, HARDWARE KIT" part#480457-001 from 3rd party vendors or online resellers to facilitate this procedure.



I apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with this issue.



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The online user manual for the DV7-1428ca seem to show a hard drive carrier that will hold 2, butare the connections for the second hard drive there?