Upgrading HD to 500gb WD black

I don't have an 11x but I may soon and trying to cover the bases. Thought this might deserve its own thread since many members seem to have done this.

Installing the hd itself is no problem. Formatting the os with a new install seems to be possible via a usb drive - can I boot to the usb drive in bios?

But I have been reading newegg reviews and they are saying something about you cant directly format to this drive standalone when its new? Am I missing something here?

I have an old inspiron 1501 running windows xp (with optical drive dvdrw) at my disposal if I need to clone a windows cd or something. Also thinking about getting this Newegg.com - acomdata HDEXXUP-240 2.5" Black USB 2.0 Enclosure Kit

 

Yes, you can put the Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB directly into the M11x. Yes, you can install Windows 7 off of a USB stick ( check out this guide here). Yes, you can boot directly off of the USB drive, and completely install Windows without ever using an optical drive.

I have no idea what people mean when they say something about not being able to directly format the drive when new. My guess is that those people don't really know what the heck they are doing, and don't realize that you need to partition the drive and format it before you can use it.

Yes, getting a USB enclosure to put your old hard drive into is a very popular thing to do. You would be in good company if you did that.

As for the drive choice - have you considered something faster than a mechanical hard drive, like a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB for $130?

 

ok thanks, I was wondering how a bare drive could be so different from every other 'oem' drive i've bought...i mean how do these people mess it up, you throw in windows 7 and it does all the work for you, formatting, etc

And I will have to do some research on the momentus. Didn't realize those hybrid drives were reasonably priced now. Too bad it cant keep the whole os on the solid state section but the price is what I thought I'd be paying for the Wd black traditional drive.

 

You should be able to boot from a usb device (dvd drive, hard drive, or thumb drive) Assuming there is acceptable boot information on the device.

I am not sure the exact hard drive you are talking about, but I put the WD Scorpio Black into my laptop as soon as I got it and re-installed everything without issue (aside from collecting newest drivers etc.). That is the only Black edition HD at 500 GB WD makes that I know of. It operated and behaved as any drive in working condition ever has for the install. If there was something different regarding the procedure or ability to format it it was not evident to me.

I recently was shopping on new egg for desktop hard drives too and read some complaints about similar things regarding Desktop hard drives, but not enough info was available for me to follow through. I have to assume that sometimes people make mistakes, or are have a malfunctioning drive and don't realize it.

My advice is to buy that HD if that is what you are interested in, and do a clean install (from scratch) on it. Unless it needs to be RMA'd it should work fine.

 

Yeah, my guess is that poeple who complained about a problem expected to just plug the drive in to their computer that already had an OS installed, and expect Windows to just mount it as a drive letter. Those people probably never had to partition a bare OEM drive before. But it sounds like you're already on top of the situation. And like you said, if you're doing a bare Windows 7 install, the Windows 7 Setup will take care of it for you.

The $130 Seagate Momentus XT 500GB (which is different than the $65 non-XT version) is the only hybrid drive on the market that actually works. It basically uses an algorithm to populate the 4GB of SLC NAND memory with the most commonly used data, such as Windows OS boot files. So the drive gets faster over time. It's a very popular drive with people in this forum, because of its balance between speed, size, capacity, and price.

But if you really want performance, I'd recommend you get a true SSD. Prices have gone down quite a bit on them in the past few months. This holiday season, I'd expect you to be able to find a fast 120GB SSD for under $200. 120GB is well more than enough to hold Windows OS, applications, and about 5-10 installed games. You would then keep all of the content that really eats up hard drive space (videos and pictures) on an external USB drive, because that type of content doesn't benefit from SSD speeds.