New laptop hard drive

Ady2009

Ady2009

Ady2009

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Joined
4 Feb 2009
Posts
115
Location
Derbyshire
Hi everyone

I have just diagnosed my laptop hard drive with a bad sectors. I tried to repair it with windows checkdisk but it got stuck on one spot for hours. With drives not being overly expensive it seems a good idea to replace it rather than try and repair it.

The laptop is about 4 years old with an 100Gb Hitachi 5400rpm SATA drive in it. I have a number of questions though,
- Is Hitachi the best one to buy or is there better brands ?
- Will a SATA II work or does it have to be SATA
- Can I fit a bigger drive. I remeber trying to fit a bigger drive in a very old laptop once and remember having trouble with it only recognising a maximum of 100Gb or so.

Thanks
 
Ady2009 said:
Hi everyone

I have just diagnosed my laptop hard drive with a bad sectors. I tried to repair it with windows checkdisk but it got stuck on one spot for hours. With drives not being overly expensive it seems a good idea to replace it rather than try and repair it.

The laptop is about 4 years old with an 100Gb Hitachi 5400rpm SATA drive in it. I have a number of questions though,
- Is Hitachi the best one to buy or is there better brands ?
- Will a SATA II work or does it have to be SATA
- Can I fit a bigger drive. I remeber trying to fit a bigger drive in a very old laptop once and remember having trouble with it only recognising a maximum of 100Gb or so.

Thanks
Click to expand...


You need to find out if it is actually a Sata drive first! Being 4 years old it will be Sata 1 at best more likley is it has an IDE drive.


You can tell by removing the drive and checking the connector or looking up the model/serial number or looking up the orginal specs of the lappy.


You 'shouldn't' have issues with drive size in a four year old lappy.

If it is Sata then a sata 2 drive should be fine although obivously will only work at sata 1 speed.
 
Hi

I was expecting it to be a IDE drive and had a old spare one ready to install. When I took the old one out it was a SATA drive which took me by suprise. It must have been one of the first machines to get SATA.
 
Ady2009 said:
Hi

I was expecting it to be a IDE drive and had a old spare one ready to install. When I took the old one out it was a SATA drive which took me by suprise. It must have been one of the first machines to get SATA.
Click to expand...

SATA of any flavour is backwards compatible.
SATA3 will work on SATA2 and SATA1 controllers, at the reduced speed.
SATA2 will work on SATA1 controllers, again at reduced speeds.

You may even get a surprise and find the controller is SATA2 - try to figure out the chipset on the laptop (google should help you find this out) and see if it is SATA1/2
 
Last edited:
Hi

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A100-225. It was a pretty high end model when I bought it back in 2006, I seem to remember it costing about £1000.

I have looked everywhere on the internet for advice about the maximum size of hard drive it can take but there is nothing.

If I do go for a big hard drive and it doesn't work. Can I just partition the dirve and treat it as two seperate drives ? Not sure how I would do that with the toshiba restore disk though.

Thanks
 
Right, you have the 945PM, i've got a A110-233 with the 945GM that i upgraded the cpu to a Core 2 Duo T5500 and 3Gb from the Core Solo and 512mb. The original hdd was 40gb, updated that to a 500gb and worked fine. Currently have a 128gb SSD but the 500gb was seen and used fine.
 
It is a good laptop, still really pleased with it. Time for some more RAM though as 1Gb just doesn't cut it anymore. The only complaint with it is once a month I have to turn it upside down and put the vacuum cleaner on the cooling fan intake, otherwise it starts to get too hot.

Thanks for the tip with the hard drive, I might as well go a nice big one.
 
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