Vostro 1700 HDD compatability query

hey there iv ordered a vostro 1700 with a singe hdd. wanted to know if i could put a second one in myself. found a 160GB 2.5" SATA Drive for £51 ex vat & wanted to know if any 2.5" would go in and be compatable, and whether it ships with a second caddy so i can install it myself.
wulfie

Dell vostro 1700
t7500
2gb ram
160 gb 5400
256 8600m gt
9 cell battery
£729

 

It should be really easy. Look for the owner's manuals on Dell's support site.

 

The one problem might be that it doesn't come with the little piece of tin that they screw the drive onto and secure it to the chassis. None of the pictures in the Owner's or Service manual show the second piece of tin.

If it has it, then you're in, and installation should be cake. If not, you'll probably have to get one from Dell or find one or fabricate one.

If you can't get or find it for the Vostro 1700, you might get it for the Inspiron 1720. They're the same machine with different badging and paint and support options.

I ordered mine with both drives populated. I don't know whether they're RAIDed together or not. When I get it (it shipped already!), I'll post details about BIOS and whatnot, but still won't know whether the empty bay is totally empty (but suspect it may indeed ship without the tray).

 

Pingnak,

that would be cool, something im also looking to do, living in the uk here, can source a couple of cheap 7200.2 sata 2.5" laptop drives cheap.

They should be nice 'n' speedy in the machine, and then will have to source 4gb of ram from the states as it looks to be cheaper over there.

 

thanks pingnak i'd appreciate that.

monkey check out microdirect or advancetec or novatech or scan.. i'v been looking around i think the best iv found is kingston 2 gb sodimms at about £68 excluding vat each

 

The down-side for the 7200 RPM drives is they do suck more power out of your battery. This can be largely offset with slower drives with higher capacity (thus higher aerial density), with bigger caches. That way you spend less time seeking and waiting for the data to come around under the heads because all the bits are closer together (to give a non-technical reason). In other words, a 7200 RPM 80GB drive will be slower (for most operations, esp. sequential access) than a 250GB 5400 RPM drive, but still consume more power and make more heat.

Make sure before you order RAM that it is guaranteed to work. Some motherboards are more fickle than others. Any SODIMM that seems to have the right specs... might not work for some inscrutable reason. And most retailers that sell the RAM won't take it back if it doesn't work right. It can also seem to work right, but the system will be unstable. They tend to assume any RAM defects were caused by you, too, so there's no exchanging bad RAM. SHOP CAREFULLY.

If you stick PC800 RAM into a Vostro, you've largely wasted your money unless you upgrade the CPU as well, as they don't ship the 800MHz FSB CPUs. And you still have to figure in what you'll do with the original RAM. You can't get rid of it, because you might have to send the computer in for warranty service, and you KNOW they will take one peek at your RAM and declare "NOT OURS" and claim that's the problem, and the warranty doesn't apply, even if it's a line of dead pixels in the middle of the LCD.

 

It's "just another hard drive", and no RAID settings are evident in the (pretty) BIOS.

This is sort of to be expected. Most manufacturers don't want to support RAID 0, as it's a ticking time-bomb.

The recovery data is in a partition on the second drive. They didn't provide a recovery disc.

 

i wasnt gonna run raid 0, i was gonna run raid 1 or raid 5 thats why i need it to have a raid controller, if i wanted raid 0 i could use software.

 

really?? no raid settings?

how can they offer the larger size options using 2 drives then?

thats weird

 

They just don't band 'em together. You do have '500MB' of storage, even if it isn't all on one logical drive.

It's also possible (not likely) the Inspiron model has a different BIOS that has RAID emulation of some sort enabled.

The only notebook I know of that supports RAID 5 is the Clevo D900C (and all of its cousins with different stickers). You need at least 3 HDDs for RAID 5. It actually uses a desktop chipset. It's chock full of fans.

 

hey pingnak,

i was hoping to run raid 0 for the performance side of things.

Laptop will be backed up every other day so not an issue for me if one dies.

Oh well guess i wont be able to