G50VT hard drive upgrade question

Hi everyone,

I will soon get a G50VT-X5 refurbished laptop. The ROG laptop can have two hard drives, I was wondering if I can put two 640GB laptop hard drive in there for a total of 1280GB. I'm not sure where to look before I go out and buy those drives, can anyone tell me if I can?

Many thanks!
-Gnimble

 

Yes you can.

 

And since Ikas only answered part 1 of 2, you can find hard drives everywhere.

Newegg has an easy interface to find them. TigerDirect is not as flashy, but on occasion they'll beat Newegg prices (plus TigerDirect doesn't tax us Californians). eBay is another place you could look.

Hell, just do a Google search.

 

Thank you. Now I just found out that there are 1TB laptop drives. Would two of those drives work too? I asked because my little brother has an older Fujitsu laptop in the past and when I bought him a large capacity drive (320GB), it only recognize half that amount. The bios of that laptop does not recognize more than 128GB, even when flashed to the latest firmware. For that reason, he is stuck with just 128GB. I just don't want to experience the same now.

Also these drives are a little bit thicker than normal 2.5" laptop drives... is there enough wiggle room in the G50VT to fit them in?

Thanks again!
Gnimble

 

I think the laptop will recognize both drives.
if it's bigger than 2.5", you might not be able to fit it in b/c the bracket in the laptop is meant for 2.5". Unless the 1TB laptop HDD comes with a special mounting bracket, I don't see how it's going to fit.

 

There are 1TB 2.5" drives. They are slightly thicker than normal drives but should fit.

Cheers,

 

The 1TB drives are 12.7mm high (I think), while "normal" drives are 9mm (or something).

The consensus I'm getting is that a 12.7mm 1TB drive will physically fit into one slot (the one on the other side from the GPU), but will not fit into the other slot because of height limitations.

 

I can confirm this, I got a 500GB external HDD from Staples for $34 last year sometime, and cracked it open and put it into my laptop. It was a 12.7mm drive and would only fit into one of the slots, where the original drive was. I used foam at one end to wedge it in place, no bracket required. Works great.

 

Thank you for all the information. Where I am going, I can only bring a laptop, so having two drives with large capacity is great since I can bring all my photos with me. I will get the thick 1TB one and one regular size 640GB (when they are on sale) to max out the disk space. Thanks again!

Cheers,
Gnimble

 

This 750GB appears to be the largest 9.5mm drive currently available.

Amazon.com: Western Digital 750 GB Scorpio Blue SATA 5400 RPM 8 MB…

Cheers,

 

So the specs on this laptop state that 640GB is the max allowed HD space. How did you guys get past that? And how much HD space were you guys able to get max useable under Win XP/Vista or 7?

 

I'm sure bigger hard drives would be recognized too if they fit in the slot. Right now I have dual 640GB drives. The laptop does not have any problem recognizing both.

Cheers,
Gnimble

 

I know you can insert drives that together are over 640GB but will windows limit you with the useable space to 640GB even if you have 2x640GB hard drives?
So what is your total useable HD space on your laptop when you run Windows?

 

With two drives, I get around 598GB of usable space on each drive for a total of around 1.2TB. I wonder why the NTFS formatting took a whole 40GB from each drive... I thought it would be less. But 1.2TB is pretty good.

Cheers,
Gnimble

 

It didn't, look at how many bytes that is: over 642 billion. Manufacturers define 1GB as 1 billion bytes, instead of the 1.073 billion bytes it actually is. Conversions eat a lot of space unfortunately

 

You're right. Being a programmer, I should know better... but I thought the manufacturers should at least stick to a standard. If I were coding 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes, I would be out of a job really fast! But then kilo means 1000. What a mess. When I sell, I want 1 kilo to be 1000 but when I buy, I want it to be 1024 ;-)

Cheers,
Gnimble

 

Wow, that's preatty good. I wonder why they stated that 640GB was the max. Gnible, you have the Asus G50VT-X5 laptop, right?

 

Yes Eurosears, I have the Asus G50VT-X5. I loved it... except I wished the battery would run as long as my Asus UL50AG (15.6" 10+ hours battery). Carrying both laptops around is a big pain... but one remains in my room for image processing and gaming and the other one I take to class to take notes. I would get a netbook but I couldn't pass on the UL50AG deal for $150 more than the cost of a netbook plus a longer battery life.

It is funny I jumped from the tiny 8" 1600x768 Sony Vaio P screen to a 15.6" 1377x768 screen. At least I won't go blind from the tiny texts.

According to an online calculator: 596GB as shown available by Windows is 639,950,127,104 bytes. If you round up, you'll get exactly 640,000,000,000 bytes. If 1k = 1000, then 640GB = 640,000,000,000 bytes. I agree that they should truthfully advertise as 596GB instead...

A file size of 596 gigabytes can also be expressed as
5,119,601,016,832 .......... bits
639,950,127,104 .......... bytes
624,951,296 .......... kilobytes
610,304 .......... megabytes
596 .......... gigabytes
0.58203125 . terabytes
0.0005683898 petabytes
0.000000555 exabytes
0.0000000005 zettabytes

Cheers,
Gnimble

PS: Zettabyte's days will come... just you wait.

 

Well, thanx for the info, I guess I am going to cramp in another 640GB into it.