Latitude E6400 can take 12.5mm thick HDD?

Hi,
I'm trying to put a 1TB drive in my laptop. Preferably without having to swap out the DVD drive. The current hard drive is ST9250421ASG, hieght 9.5mm. But I wouldn't consider my laptop slim, would a 12.5mm fit?

Thanks.

 

No E6400 cannot take 12.5mm drives. There is a Samsung 1 TB 5400 rpm notebook drive that is 9.5mm.

 

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Will that make a big difference in overall performance? Will my computer crawl to a halt? Currently running Win7 32bit, Intel P8400 2.26GHz.

Thanks.

 

No not really, only if you do a ton of I/O (constantly copy large files on your drive). Modern 5400 rpm drives aren't any less responsive than a 7200 rpm in my experience, though the Samsung 1 TB was really meant as a storage drive...with the E6400 you should be able to purchase an optical drive caddy and if you are in AHCI SATA operation, you can hot swap it very readily if you need your optical drive.

 

The only other 1TB drive I found was the Western Digital WD10TPVT. But that's 12.5mm in height. Anyone knows of any other 9.5mm 1TB drives?

 

There are no others.

 

I don't much care for the DVD drive, I rarely use it. I'll just use someone else's burner if I need it.. But running two hard drives at the same time would kill the battery in no time.

I think I should be able to ditch the original drive and boot off the new one right? I don't see why not, would I loose any performance using the optical controller instead? Might be a stupid question, but I'm not the expert at customizing laptops hence the question.

 

1. Yes.
2. Shouldn't lose any performance.

 

If you are worried about performance then one option would be to put a smallish (120GB? SSD) into the HDD slot as the boot drive and the HDD in the ODD slot for the bulk storage. I think that the ODD port is only SATA-150 but that's still faster than any current 2.5" HDD.

With respect to extra power consumption, an extra storage device may take a couple of watts when actively reading or writing but less than 1 watt when on idle. Tom's Hardware has some comprehensive charts of HDD and SSD power consumption under different operating conditions.

John