Installing a Second HD in my Dell 1720

First of all, can this be done. Second, how hard would it be. Third, can I just use the second hard drive to support my Itunes library and video files?

The reason I ask is because I have well over 80GB of music and my library is constantly growing. I also save whole seasons of shows onto my laptop. right now I have a 220GB HD in my computer and the 80GB is killing my memory space. That is why I'm wondering if this is possible and comments are welcome. I have an external hard drive but lugging that thing around when I'm on the go is a hassle.

 

Not sure if its possible to be a stock add-on, may require serious modding. The easiest and most likely cheapest idea is to get yourself a 320GB or larger hard drive and partition it and use your current as a portable external.

 

Is a 320GB HD the largest you could fit in a notebook? Just curious because that actually might work for what I need. If it doesn't, the other option would be for me to finish re-building my old desktop that crashed and get a 550GB HD in there.

But I absolutely love my 1720.

And, I'm upgrading to Vista Ultimate and I was planning on running it at 64bit. Would it be wise to upgrade to 6mb of RAM or stay at 4? If my machine doesn't have 4 (I'm pretty sure it does) I'll upgrade the RAM anyway to 4MB.

 

Actually, your case can support 2 HDDs.



You 'll probably need a caddy for your 2nd drive, something that could be easily found on ebay.

The max capacity for 2,5'' HDD is 500GB.
You could buy 2X of the new WD 5000BEVT and have a total of 1TB internal disk space.

4GB (and not MBytes) of RAM are plenty enough.

 

Had no idea them dells supported that. Good info. The new western digitial 500's are quite nice

 

That is great news. I'm really excited now. Thank you for the help and I am definitely going the route of two 500GB by western digital. Does anyone prefer Seagate over them?

And one last question, If I don't have 4GB of RAM, does anyone know what type of RAM I could get for my computer?

Also, 5400rpm or 7200rpm for the HD's?

 

DDR2 PC5300 667MHz.

 

500GB 7200rpm isn't available yet, so 5400rpm is your only option.

Or you'd have to settle for 320GB/7200 rpm. Have a look at Seagate 7200.3. Cheap, fast and 5 year warranty.

 

Oh, ok. I don't mind going with a 5400rpm HD. There won't be heating issues will there?

 

u can find 2nd hd tray & connetor on "newmodeus.com" or ebay.
the tray is not interchangeable, "2nd hd" is marked on the 2n hd tray,
1st tray doesnt fit in 2nd.

 

Could someone please link me to a site where I could purchase 2 of the 2.5' 500GB 5400rpm HD's? I looked on newegg and I only found a 320 that was a 5400rpm.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152114

 

How does the samsung compare in quality to Western Digital?

 

one reliable source is Crucial.com for RAM. (no relation to them - but I have given them some of my hard-earned money lol)

1720 has a reputation as an excellent, reliable machine. I envy you!

 

Right now my other replaced hard drive is sitting on the shelf. You'll need a 2nd caddy (the 2nd caddy is not the same as the first caddy), an interposer, 4 screws to mount the hard drive to the caddy and 3 screws to mount the caddy to the main board. I forgot what type of screws they were, but they were pretty expensive...

 

The biggest problem in case of hard disk upgrade is to know whether your notebook BIOS supports that much HDD space. I have come across many cases when people bought 2 320 GB HDDs only to be not recognized by their notebooks' BIOS.

 

Umm, isn't harddisk space OS-limited and not BIOS? I've never heard such, that BIOS could be a problem for much HDD-space?! If it's not a very very old notebookt or such.

 

I've heard that installing this Hard Drive did not present any problems for the BIOS. Those who have tested it said that they didn't even have to change their BIOS and it ran fine.

 

What I meant was sometimes the BIOS doesn't recognise the secondary hard disk. That problem can however be solved by doing a simple BIOS upgrade available from the manufacturer's website.

 

what?
can OSes artificially limit disk space? I thought they just do that for ram and number of cpus.

 

I did it. I was going to give in and just buy a 320GB 7200rpm WD HD but I got lucky and when I went on newegg this morning, bam, the 500GB was there. So if you guys are interested, check it out.

I got it for $149 and I only ordered one right now. I was thinking about it and I don't really need two yet. I think the 220GB that's in my dell right now will serve as a great second HD. All I'm going to be using it for is storing movies, tv shows, and my itunes library anyway.

speaking of which, I have one final favor to ask. Since I will no longer be needing my D partition on my (now) old HD because I will have an actual Vista CD if anything goes wrong and I'm going to clone my HD onto my external HD when I get it up and running, can I delete this? I then wanted to delete the C partition and just make one large partition. Is it that easy?

Thanks for all your guys help in this process by the way. It's much appreciated.