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    Upgrade Hard Drive to 320Gigs for $150!!!(ACER 4420)

    Discussion in 'Acer' started by ckjala, Feb 23, 2008.

  1. ckjala

    ckjala Newbie

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    160 gigs is a lot of space but believe me, you will fill it up fast. Yesterday (2-22-08), I picked up the 320 gig Black Cherry USB portable drive made by SimpleTech for $150 at BB. Inside it has a WD 320 gig SATA 2.5 HDD that will fit right into the ACER 4420. I partitioned the drive into 80 gig for C: and the rest for D: and reloaded XP (drivers are available on the ACER site, UK site is better than the USA site for some odd reason). After all was done, I put the original Hitachi 160 gig HDD back into the enclosure and, now I have a 320 gig HDD in the ACER and a 160 gig portable USB drive (Whoo-hoo).

    Since the both drives are SATA, you can transfer data directly to and from a desktop using any SATA cable. I would recommend rebuilding XP from the install CD and not trying to use imaging software like ghost or acronis, although it may work. But I would definitely recommend getting rid of Vista. This laptop is not powerful enough to handle the EXTREEM overhead included with vista. For that matter, I don't think any laptop can handle that kind of overhead! Once you UPGRADE to XP (yes it's really an upgrade to XP from Vista) you will notice a dramatic improvement in performance!!!!!!!!!!!
     
    ckjala, Feb 23, 2008
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  2. gengerald

    gengerald Technofile Extraordinaire

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    I got a quick question, how fast is your 320gb? I am looking for a smaller external and if its running at 7.2k, I have just found it. TY for the post.
     
    gengerald, Feb 23, 2008
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  3. tvone2

    tvone2 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I was thinking the same thing..
    Simple tech drives are cheap.. I dought it is 7200k rpm or 16meg cache..
    ckjala??
     
    tvone2, Feb 23, 2008
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  4. ckjala

    ckjala Newbie

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    Neither drive had the specs on it, although I could have searched on the manufactures web site. It is my understanding that most laptop drives are 5400 RPM (I could be wrong). 7200 and 10000 RPM are mostly seen in the larger 3.5 drives. If you do find higher RPM drives you can be assured that the battery life will be shorter.
     
    ckjala, Feb 23, 2008
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  5. ckjala

    ckjala Newbie

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    Correction: Hitachi, Seagate and Fujitsu make a 7200 RPM laptop drive. The largest I could find was 200 Gig. The only difference was 1 to 2 second less seek time between 5400 and 7200, no real big performance gain there. Nothing said about battery life, but it makes sense that faster RPM = more power.
     
    ckjala, Feb 23, 2008
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  6. pascallee

    pascallee Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have just read you post and I am also interested in doing the swapping of my laptop HDD with this 320GB black cherry. I would like to know if the opening process is difficult or simple. Can I easily open this case without damaging it?
     
    pascallee, May 14, 2008
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