HDD upgrade on A8Jr

I have been primarily a desktop user until I bought this Asus A8Jr. So I am pretty clueless when it comes to notebook upgrade. I have a few questions regarding upgrading my current 80GB HDD to something with higher capacity. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

1. Would any 2.5" drive fit into the HDD bay? I understand some drives with high capacities have width more than 2.5". For example, Seagate's Momentus 7200.2 SATA 3.0Gb/s 200-GB Laptop Hard Drive is actually 2.75" wide. Will this fit into my system?

2. With A8Jr, am I limited to HDD of a certain size? i.e. the 200GB Seagate I mentioned in question #1.

3. With A8Jr's already below average battery performance, would switching to a 7200rpm drive make that dramatically worse?

4. Any other suggestions on HDD brand and model?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Regards,
Joe

 

1. Any 2.5 inch, assuming it's not too thick (9-10mm should do, most of them have the standard height of 9.5mm I think), make sure you have the proper interface! I.e., don't buy a SATA drive if your notebook is PATA. I don't know whether the A8Jr is SATA or PATA btw.

I've never heard of a non-standard-size notebook harddrive :-/. I'm not sure it would fit, the only way is to measure the HDD bay (taking into account that those extra .25 inches can be in the worst case either completely to the right, or completely to the left -- I think you know what I mean, allow for tolerance on both sides of the connector).

2. There might be BIOS limitations. The only way to know is to find another A8Jr user that has upgraded and for whom it works. Perhaps a generic A8J can be used as an indicator (I don't think they are significantly different).

That being said, I don't expect a 200GB will be a problem. But I can't guarantee it.

3. Not really. Actually the power draw of the HDD may depend as much on the brand/type, as on the rotation speed. Just try to find out a comparison between your old HDD and what you're planning to buy, see how the power draw (Watts) compares on idle, seek, read, write. I would expect a real-life difference in battery at most on the order of minutes (say at the outermost 10 minutes shorter batt life). It might get a bit hotter though.

Also keep in mind that current 5400RPM drives are noticeably close in performance to 7200RPMs. Perhaps you would like to stay with 5400, and get a larger capacity?

4. People will argue for and against brands, depending on whom you ask. I've had good experience with Hitachi Travelstars (though they are noisy and not very power-efficient) and Seagate Momentus (clicks sometimes but works just fine, and besides the clicks it's so quiet you don't even know it's working, also typically very power efficient). Other brands to consider are Western Digital and (perhaps) Fujitsu and Toshiba.

My order of preference would be Seagate, Hitachi, WD.

 

E.B.E., thanks a bunch for the information.

I did a little bit more research on the HDD physical dimension. Turns out that all current generation 2.5" HDD actually are 2.75" wide. I guess the marketing people decided that 2.5 is much easier to say than 2.75.

 

You're welcome.

Weird, that dimension thing. Maybe it goes hand in hand with the billion bytes GB in marketing the HDD...