HP dv9000t Dual HD upgrade questions.

Hey guys, I'm lovin my new laptop, but I'm craving more space. In all, I have 160gb of space via 2 80GB HDs. My question is, do I have to upgrade these to new identical drives, say two of the exact same 120GB HD, or can I mix and match? I don't understand RAID in the least, aside from RAID 1, and I don't even know how to tell if my disks are setup that way. Help!

 

Hello again Blake, If your planning on upgrading your drives I'm positive that you need two of the same capacity if you are using a RAID setup, however I don't think setting up RAID on the dv9000 series is possible.

I have read that RAID is totally disabled on the dv9000 series, so you can mix and match drives at will

 

I don't really have much of a need for a RAID setup to the extent of my knowledge. Like I said, I don't even know whether or not I have a setup on here currently. I can say for sure that I didn't set it up, so I doubt HP sent that stock since I haven't seen anything about it. If at all possible, I'd like to get a new 7200 RPM 80GB for my OS drive, and a 200GB 4200RPM for my storage. Is this possible for the dual hard drive setup?

 

yes, it will be possible

 

Yeah I don't think RAID is possible on that notebook so you shouldn't have anything to worry about as far a different drive sizes go. I doubt there would be any problems with that setup as the dv9000 is offered with a 7200, 5400, and 4200RPM drive option also so I'm going to say yes.

 

First off...do you see two separate drives/partitions each the same capacity? If so, you don't have RAID enabled and you're probably good to go on upgrading just one drive.

If you see a single/partition drive whose capacity is 80GB or 160GB, you have RAID 1 or 0 respectively...which probably means you cannot get out of that setup without going through your BIOS and/or reloading Windows onto only a single disc.

Other than that, as stated you should run into very little trouble when doing this. Probably the worst part will be transferring all your files...but that just takes time.

 

Ok, things make much more sense now.
I DO see two seperate hard drives, both partitioned the same.
Thanks for all of your replies guys, they are much appreciated.

-Blake

 

im thinking of getting this laptop.quick ? ,Can you upgrade the memory later,or is this max at 2gig? my specs C2Duo,200gb 7200 hd, 512mb nvidia Geforce go 7600. 2048mb DDR2 memory. I searched the forum no result,and HP,cant seem to get the right ans one tech said yes another said no its max at 2gig.

 

It is 2GB, as per the HP DV9000 Hardware Maintenance Guide (Section 1.1 Features).

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00748701.pdf

 

That 2GB limit is common in consumer notebooks right now...there's no foreseeable need for more in a notebook (at least for now) and it is cheaper to build a notebook motherboard that only can address 2GB or RAM.