Hard Drive Upgrade - L701X

I've had my L701X for about three years now and it's been great, however it's stating to become awfully slow. Perhaps a reformat would help, and I was thinking it might be worthwhile to replace the hard drive. It still has the original 640 GB drive.

Can I replace it with any 2.5" SATA hard drive? I was thinking of getting a WD "Black" 750 GB 7200 RPM drive, but they come in both 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s... Will either work?

I am not too familiar with the benefits of SSD other than they are more reliable than normal hard drives. Is it possible/simple to install one and use it for booting and programs? My machine has an empty slot for a 2nd hard drive. If so, would I need a 2.5" SATA III or SATA II?

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

Yes, you can use any 2.5" SATA drive including SSDs. You can use 3gb/s and 6gb/s drives.

 

Definitely get a SSD for bootup and programs. No point in getting a hard drive for that now.
Move current hard drive to that empy slot and use it as secondary hard drive.

And yeah one other thing, a 3 year old hard drive becoming awfully slow might be indicating a failure in near future so make sure to keep back up if you have some important data on that.

 

I'm not sure if it's the hard drive being slow, or that there's just too much crud on this computer. I want to reformat to speed it up, and replace the HD to mitigate a failure.

So I'm thinking I'll go with a SSD, something smallish, maybe 100-200 GB, and another 750 GB harddrive in the second slot.

Is there a guide on how to reformat and reinstall windows onto an SSD?

 

Just do it as you would on a regular HDD... you don't really need to do anything special anymore.

 

One more question... I am looking at getting a WD 750 GB hard drive. They have "Black" (6 Gb/s) and "Scorpio Black" (3 Gb/s). The rest of the specs look identical. The Black is priced slightly higher.

Judging by the number of reviews on NewEgg and Amazon, the Scorpio Black is FAR more popular than the Black. Is there a particular reason for this? Which one will work best for me? It will be used primarily for storage of music, photos, and HD movies. I'm going to get a separate SSD for programs and booting.

 

I'd guess the Scorpio Black is more popular because it's cheaper while the performance difference is probably negligible.