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hd for laptop -Caviar Scorpio vs samsung

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I'm going to upgrade my gateway's (solo 9550) hd. it has now IBM travelstar 20gb.
First question -will all 2.5inch harddrives fit into it? This will be the first time I will be changing something in a notebook.
I got 2 nice offers (I'll buy 40 or 60 gb) -one's WD scorpio. Second's some samsung. Both 5400rpm 8mb cache and both manufacturer's proved to make reliable drives for normal systems but I don't have any experience with notebook drives. This scorpio features some antishock solutions (looks better but this may be only marketing ;] ) and claims to have 600 000 mtbf while samsung only 330 000 (again...'real' life will be different than specifications)
and there is a bit more expensive toshiba with 16mb cache...


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by machines_of_hate on 01/02/05 01:55 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

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There are different thicknesses of 2.5" drive. Most of the newer systems use 9.5mm thick drives. Some have room for thicker drives, but use a spacer, or have empty space above the drive.

If the drives you're looking at are 9.5mm, they should work in nearly anything. If they're thicker, you should check to see how much room you have.

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

thx crashman - the samsung I was told is 9mm -so it should be fine? may be too loose in this hard drive bay the laptop has?

I've just found out solo 9550 can support 40gb hd as the largest ...that suxx -do laptops have upgradeable bios??
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A "9mm" drive should fit any laptop. As for any size limits, depending on the age, it would be 8GB (Pentium erra), 37GB (Pentium2 erra), 80GB (PIII erra).

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

8, 32, and 64 would seem more precise, but for some reason it isn't.

OK, so let me do the math, 32GB (data) would be by hard drive ratings 34GB (using 1024 to 1000byte conversion)...nope, it doesn't make sense, but the limits I've seen are 8.4GB, 37GB, 80GB, and 127GB! And I know this to be true because I tried replacing an 80GB drive with a 100GB drive and it didn't work without a BIOS update! Were the limit 64GB, the 80GB drive wouldn't have worked!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

and there's one more issue - one board like one I had (it was after upgradeing to bios version "supporting" large hd's) -it's bios shows 32gb while os see full space on 40 and even 80gb hd providing the partition's were already created before on other mobo. When I attached brand new 60gb samsung I wasn't able to use more space than 32gb (or around 30gb but 32k kilobytes sth like that, don't remember exactly)
In all those hd cases (as far as I remember) jumpers had to be set to <32gb limit (otherwise the hd wasn't recognized)

Probabelly he does not like the word samsung as a whole. But in anyway, anything that is 5400 rpm is a whole lot of an upgrade from 4200. I personally would not put WD into laptop, caz of their noise.

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...
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