laptops and hard drives
 

Hello,

i'm thinking of getting a bigger hard drive for my laptop, but i'm uncertain as to compatibility issues. Do manufacturers have their own stuff, not easily compatible with others, or can you more or less use most available (new) 2,5" HDDs with most (new) laptops?

What should i pay particular attention to re compatibility, if you just have these different HDD makes (hitachi, seagate) instead of plain "this works with fujitsu models 1,2,3 and dell models 5,6,7 etc"?

Thanks.

In my limited experience, I've been able to use any 2.5" IDE harddrive w/ the laptops I've worked on. I don't know if SATA drives are available or not. The only gotcha w/ the IDE's I've come across is the first couple times I opened the laptops, the connectors appeared different. But when I fiddled around w/ a set of pliers, I found some laptop vendors have adapters on the drives that go from the standard 2.5" drive pins to a flat connector. It threw me for a bit, but you can just pull it off the old drive and reuse it.

When I upgraded my laptop's (IBM T40) hard drive, I stayed within the same manufacturer (Hitachi) and simply selected a larger capacity drive (80G from 40G). Just like with desktop hard drives, as long as you purchase a drive with the correct interface (PATA, SATA, etc) you should be OK.