P-6860: Extra Sata hard drive question.

Okay, sorry to be a noob and all but I have a qusetion..

I opened up my laptop yesterday and I noticed that there was a second slot for an additional hard drive. I want to add another one ( possibly faster one ). Now, can I add another one and combine both of them into one big one? Or how would it work? Can someone please tell me exactly what I should buy and what I should do to have best performance? And how do I know if a hard drive is compatible with my computer. Thanks !

 

As long as you get a 2.5" SATA drive it should be compatible... this laptop supports RAID so, yes you can set them up as one large drive... or do other things that RAID offers. I don't want to go into RAID, but just do a google of "raid wiki" and you should come up with some stuff.

Otherwise you can just install the drive as a second HDD and use it seperatly without RAID as well.


A note (I'm wondering myself)... Western Digital is releasing a new 2.5" drive called the "velociraptor"... but my understanding is that it's 10cm thick vs the 9cm thickness of "normal" 2.5" drives... does anyone know or can test if the 10cm velociraptor will fit in our 6860/6831 PCs?????

 

The drives need to be the same speed and size, preferably they should also be the same model. This lappy supports raid 0 and 1 through hardware.

 

The Velociraptor is a 2.5", 320GB drive, but the passive heat-sink it sits in for mounting in a desktop computer. The heat this thing would generate would deter me from installing one in a laptop. I'm tempted to get one for my desktop though. I've been using a 150GB Raptor X drive for about a year and have had absolutely no problems. Heat is not an issue either since I have a case with fairly good airflow.

 

You'd only need the same size/speed etc if you're going to use RAID... otherwise any size or speed should work if you're just trying to add another drive.

 

Well... removing the Heatsink does void the warranty I guess, but it also only dropped temps about 4-7c. Just going by the articles at anandtech.com and tomshardware.com

My understanding is that the drive has a "max temp" rating of 60c... with the heatsink it runs at about 40c without it and 33c with it... I'd assume and extra 10c if running in our laptops putting it at about 50c which I think is still not horrible... although not ideal.

I'd personally still like to try one of these beasts... but the whole 9cm vs 10cm thickness gives me pause.

 

WD says that the heatsink is not needed... so I am sure you can loose it without breaking the warranty.

I am curious though... should two 320gb's in raid 0 be faster than one 200gb 7200rpm with 16mb cache? (never entered into RAID with slow HDD's... so I have no clue... just threw 5 SSD's into a hospital server and raided them up)

 

I bet someone on this site will try it though. I'm very curious myself. If anyone has some technical savvy and are willing to sacrifice their laptop (to some degree), I bet it can be done with some mods to the harddrive bay. But, I'll definitely get one for my desktop when they are released for retail sale.