Laptop Hard Drive on Desktop

simbady · 22 Aug 2009 at 14:27

Hi i recently sent off my hard drive as it was broken i was wondering can i take the harddrive out of my laptop and put it in my pc as the laptop is very old and i cant rly do much the hard drive on the laptop i SATA.

thanks

miniyazz · 22 Aug 2009 at 15:53

Yes, but you'll probably have to reinstall Windows onto the laptop HDD. And don't expect it to be fast..

JonJ678 · 22 Aug 2009 at 17:04

As long as it is sata you'll have no problems. Laptop pata drives use a different cable to desktop ones, so you need an adapter in this case.

It wont be especially slow, I'd expect around the same speeds as the WD green I'm using as my OS drive at present.

Pleased to be in a signature

miniyazz · 23 Aug 2009 at 00:24

JonJ678 said:
As long as it is sata you'll have no problems. Laptop pata drives use a different cable to desktop ones, so you need an adapter in this case.

It wont be especially slow, I'd expect around the same speeds as the WD green I'm using as my OS drive at present.

Pleased to be in a signature

Haha indeed, you're there til something better comes along

Didn't know about it being a different IDE connection, but I suppose it makes sense.

I'd expect it to be far slower than your WD Green though. If the laptop is "very old", that means it's going to be a "very old" 5400rpm (at best) HDD - IIRC the WD Greens are somewhere between 5400 and 7200? Unless I'm mixing them up with a different make. So somewhat slower seek times (nothing too drastic) but fairly abysmal read/write performance, much lower than the Green (which will have much higher platter density, despite being a 3.5" drive).

JonJ678 · 23 Aug 2009 at 00:53

Ah, you're probably right. I think the WD drive is meant to be variable in speed but in practise tends to run at 5.4k all the time. Certainly it's a hell of a lot slower than the F1s I'm using for storage.

I think I missed the magic words 'very old', but then isn't sata a fairly new thing? All old computers I see have pata cables in. Hopefully the OP succeeded in setting up the drive and will be along shortly to say it's running beautifully

miniyazz · 23 Aug 2009 at 02:40

JonJ678 said:
Ah, you're probably right. I think the WD drive is meant to be variable in speed but in practise tends to run at 5.4k all the time. Certainly it's a hell of a lot slower than the F1s I'm using for storage.

I think I missed the magic words 'very old', but then isn't sata a fairly new thing? All old computers I see have pata cables in. Hopefully the OP succeeded in setting up the drive and will be along shortly to say it's running beautifully

You should be using the F1s for your OS

I'm sure you've realised that though..
That's true, I missed the SATA reference. Perhaps "very old" is an overstatement. I feel we need more facts to be able to come to a decent conclusion

Certainly my old laptop from September '06 had IDE, but my desktop of Spring '07 had SATA and a SATA HDD, although of course my laptop could have been older hardware.