This will be my first hard drive upgrade, so please help me out (and forgive the noobish questions). I have nobody else to ask!

Hey all,

This will be my first hard drive upgrade, so please help me out (and forgive the noobish questions). I have nobody else to ask!

I currently have an HP dv9207us notebook running Vista Home Premium.
From the factory, it came with a Momentus 5400.2 SATA 1.5Gb/s 120-GB Hard Drive as shown here:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...f32b010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&reqPage=Model

The challenge is I'd like to upgrade the hard drive, perhaps to 320GB. I do mostly office work on it, plus some occasional gaming.

In terms of priority, what I'm looking for is:
-Capacity
-Speed
-Battery life

(Obviously it has to be reliable!)


Here are my questions:

1) Since my lappy originally came with a 5400rpm drive, would it work with a 7200rpm drive? (And when would 7200rpm make a noticeable difference?)

2) I really don't want to do a complete Vista OS and application programs/settings install on the new hard drive since I'm not sure my available time and technical skills would be up to it. Therefore, would this product allow me to simply "clone" the new hard drive with Vista and all my software before I remove the old hard drive so that I would then be able to just install the new hard drive into my lappy and run it? (And is cloning software like this legal?)

Apricorn ADW-USB-KIT DriveWire Universal Hard Drive Adapter

http://www.compsource.com/pn/ADWUSBKIT/Apricorn_41/

3) Given the above requirements, which hard drive models are the best values?

4) Is there a GB capacity limit to what will work with Vista Home Premium?

5) If something were to go wrong during the exchange operation, should I be able to just reinstall the old hard drive and be back in business?

THANK YOU!!!!

 

1) a 320gb 7200rpm drive should be faster
2) Looks like it should work, but I never used their software. You could also buy a cheap 2.5' external enclosure and use other cloning software. I used acronis, but it costs $$. Theres some free imaging software available, check the free software thread for more info.
3) I would get the 7200 rpm 320gb hitachi, seagate, or western digital. They are all roughly the same in terms of performance, i would get the cheapest.

4) You will be fine

5) Should work

 

Can you recommend any good online retailers of hard drives with good pricing? Also preferably one whose website can help select all compatible hard drives for a given notebook model.

Thanks again.

 

Here was the latest deal I saw
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=339682

You could also try newegg.com, tigerdirect.com, and buy.com as they tend to have pretty good deals on hard-drives and I've never had any issues with them.

I don't think they will tell you if your drive is compatible with your specific model, but as long as you have a sata I or sata II connection, these 2.5 inch drives will fit

 

Also see the quick guide to cloning. The trial version of Acronis should be OK for one time cloning. It works for 30 days.

John

 

1. 7200 would work fine, I like my Western Digital Scorpio Black, but they're all pretty decent.
2. Having a DV9207 I believe you have a second unused hard drive bay, the FASTEST way to clone the drive would be to get a caddy and install the second hard drive in the machine and then use Gparted or a similar program that boots from CD/DVD to clone the partitions and then swap drives, you can also then leave the existing drive as a storage drive if you wanted.
4. There isn't a laptop HD that will exceed the capacity limits of your laptop or vista
5. As long as you don't do something bad like delete the partitions etc on the original drive you can always put it back in the #1 spot if there's a problem

 

Thanks for all the advice. You guys gave me some homework, and here's what I came up with.

OK, here is my current HDD:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...f32b010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&reqPage=Model

And I think I'm going to replace it with this one (notice all the spec differences):

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...f64f9110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&locale=en-US

I found the new one for $84.62 shipped from this retailer:

http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?650800

What do you all think?

 

Its a good harddrive, but I wouldnt buy it from nextwarehouse. That does not ound like a renowned website.
Their reseller ratings are really bad:
http://www.resellerratings.com/store/NextWarehouse

I would buy it from a reputable place like zipzoomfly, ewiz or newegg.
Newegg probably has the cheapest price after shipping,
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=S9320421AS&c=fr&pid=854588023a2078072b330770b607dba4b9f35819970d8872e37027bad3b276a0

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10008671

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148336

K-TRON