Inspiron 1720 Hard Drive Questions

Recently I bought the said laptop and maxed out the specs as much as I can afford at the time, well except the hard disk that is, I left it at 250GB thinking it was enough and upgrading it is nothing more but blatant overcompensating. Well now I realized I was dead wrong and wish to expand my HD space.

I was wondering if, since that the 1720 supports dual hard disks, is it okay for me to buy, let say a 500 GB HD of the same size and just plug it in? Won't there be a limit to as how much of GB you can put in?

If I put in a 500GB along with the 250GB one, will there be any problems with that?

 

With SATA (the type of hard drive the 1720 and nearly all new laptops use), you can use pretty much as much space as you can get without a problem. I'm sure there's an upper limit somewhere, but it's way beyond any amount you'll use today without spending tens of thousand dollars on hard drives.

It'll work just fine with a 500 GB and 250 GB hard drive. They'll just show up as seperate drives in Explorer, but Windows (or any other operating system) will be fine with them. If you were trying to use a RAID array (a technique for data backup or increasing hard drive speed) then you might get some wonky results from combining drives of different sizes, but so long as you just want to put in an extra drives for the space of it, they'll work just great. If you don't know what RAID is, it'll work.

The one point where you could be tripped up is the choice of a 500 GB hard drive. You'll need a 2.5-inch form factor (often labeled notebook) hard drives, with a height of 9.5mm. The last part is the tricky part - two of the three currently available 500 GB, 2.5-inch hard drives are 12.5mm in height and will not fit in most notebooks (including, I believe, the 1720). Samsung makes the only 500 GB, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm hard drive at the moment, the Spinpoint M6 500 GB. That is the hard drive you want, as the 500 GB models by Hitachi and Fujitsu are 12.5mm tall. Western Digital will have a 9.5mm one soon, but I don't think it's shipped quite yet.

 

Awesome! Thanks for the heads up about the height thing.

I'm thinking of purchasing the HM500LI (500GB 9.5mm) Samsung HD. A bit steep at 130 bucks, but might be worth it

 

That's the same one - a different name but the same. Seems like a pretty good price for it based on a quick Google.

 

Don't forget, you will need a HDD caddy and interposer for the second bay if you want to install a Second HDD..

clicky here

 

That's a good choice. I'd say go for the 500GB one and another 250GB 7200rpm drive to fill out the empty slot.

Anyway, I installed mine with dual 7k320 drives. (Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm) drives... doesn't run hot, nor uses alot of battery power. Enjoying it!